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Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

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Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#51

Post by cosmie »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #29
saurik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be shocked that Twitter convinced an entire generation of software developers that you need to obtain something called an "API key"--which can somehow be refused or even revoked once granted--in order to write a client for their protocol. "Back in my day", we just reverse engineered the official client and used whatever algorithm it used to talk to the server and called the war won :/.

Is this system of "API keys" why Pidgin doesn't handle all these new IM protocols, and why there's no other good old-fashioned multi-protocol clients for them (that I'm aware of)?

Franz[1] is the closest thing I’ve found to a client around newer IM protocols.

[1] https://meetfranz.com/

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#52

Post by bradleyjg »

danans wrote: post #17

IANAL, but violation of terms of service seems like a breach of contract, not a crime. For that sort of thing there is always the civil court system if the plaintiff feels like their loss due to the violation is high enough to warrant pursuing the legal case. But maybe the actual loss caused by the automated downloads in this case wasn't high enough and they pushed the criminal angle to make some kind of point.

The best analogy seems to be trespass. A store generally allows anyone to come in. Absent any kind of notice you can go into a store and take pictures. But if there is a big prominent sign on the door that says "no photos allowed" and you go in and take a picture, you aren't just subject to being thrown out. You are (depending on some nuances of state law) committing criminal trespass. Likewise, if for whatever reason, you've already been thrown out and told you are never welcome back then the minute you step in the door you are trespassing.

I don't see any reason why e.g. a website that prominently displays a notice saying that scrapping tools aren't welcome and that puts in place reasonable measures to prevent scrapping tools from being used, shouldn't be protected by the law of trespass from people that deliberately evade these preferences. Likewise, I don't see a banned HN poster that creates a new account shouldn't be considered a trespasser. Of course there are issues of prosecutorial discretion and limited law enforcement resources, but that's a separate question than what should or shouldn't be criminal.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#53

Post by matt4077 »

prepend wrote: post #2

This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong. When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access. The mere idea that a web server…

Or, maybe, this young generation grew up with the internet being a tool with actual power. Where before, it was pure novelty, with no real-world consequences of destructive behaviour.

This young generation, based on a study of history, prefers to be governed by agreed-upon rules, rather than "might is right".

Note that I, and probably the vast majority of every generation, agree with this court's decision that ToS are not enforceable.

But the reason is not the challenge to enforce such ToS through technical means. It is the fundamental unfairness of a process that would allow such one-sided contracts to be drawn.

As a counter-example: your philosophy of "I can do whatever I can do" would allow limitless collection, use, and sale of personal information. But I would hope that most people actually do see value in Facebook not being allowed to sell your private images and messages to the highest bidder if they ever choose to.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#54

Post by keldaris »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #46
keldaris wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because reverse engineering some IM protocols is far from trivial. Skype, in particular, is a nightmare of obfuscation, as I understand (second hand knowledge from having wanted to replace it with Pidgin in the past, I haven't tried reverse engineering it myself).

Skype I know is infamously hard, but I'm wondering about the more general case -- are the problems there similar to the problems with Skype, or are they due to something else?

As far as I know, they're a combination of it being hard work and there just not being enough of a qualified developer community around Pidgin etc. to put in the effort required. I think people generally underestimate the sheer amount of work involved in reverse engineering an IM protocol, even one that's not particularly well obfuscated.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#55

Post by askvictor »

prepend wrote: post #2

This is positive news. It seems like the more liberal approach taken when protocols were written is being challenged more by young users who grew up under more stable rules that accepted terms of service as very strong. When I was growing up you went by what the protocol allowed. If an http response came back you have access, if it prompted for credentials, then you didn’t have access. The mere idea that a web server…

What does young/old have anything to do with this? If anything, I'd put it the other way around: I'll bet it's primarily old and conservative people (who don't know how the internet thing operates and want to police digital assets like physical ones) who push for this kind of restriction/law, while so many young people have grown up in an era where they share everything.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#57

Post by jeremy_wiebe »

pwaai wrote: post #40
justinjlynn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that young people grew up with stable rules. It's that young people grew up under the influence of industrial information warfare tactics and propaganda. As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy (thanks to the Software Publishers Association and the friendly local Microsoft rep), this conditioning to get kids (and less…

> As someone that was prevented from distributing Linux at high school because the administrators thought that any copying was piracy I remember having this discussion with in HS and also at work with people who were convinced pirating a PSX game is same as stealing, while not realizing there is no evidence that suggests a pirated copy means a lost sale (people can't afford it in places like Brasil where they still p…

Equating “fair use” of a website to pirating software is a stretch. In the first case the method of access is at issue (not whether you can or not). In the second the company has not given you any _legal_ right to access.

I don’t see how affordability (or lack of it) is justification to the game.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#58

Post by benchaney »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #42
saurik wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I continue to be shocked that Twitter convinced an entire generation of software developers that you need to obtain something called an "API key"--which can somehow be refused or even revoked once granted--in order to write a client for their protocol. "Back in my day", we just reverse engineered the official client and used whatever algorithm it used to talk to the server and called the war won :/.

I dunno about that.. controlling access to your server is much more important today because tech is ubiquitous, and a big target for bad actors. In the old days very few people would know enough and care enough to reverse engineer your protocol.. when a service has billions of users and valuable data, that changes. If Twitter did not have an API key, they would spend 2x the money on absorbing & defending against DDoS…

> If Twitter did not have an API key, they would spend 2x the money on absorbing & defending against DDoSes and security vulnerabilities. That cost would get passed on to us with frequent outages and many more ads in our feeds. Or a leak of someones DMs.

This is complete nonsense. Attackers aren't going to follow your TOS, so what possible benefit could asking your users to do it on little more than the honor system provide?

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#59

Post by vadimberman »

michaelmrose wrote: post #20
danans wrote: post #17

IANAL, but violation of terms of service seems like a breach of contract, not a crime. For that sort of thing there is always the civil court system if the plaintiff feels like their loss due to the violation is high enough to warrant pursuing the legal case. But maybe the actual loss caused by the automated downloads in this case wasn't high enough and they pushed the criminal angle to make some kind of point.

There was no loss. They are attempting to missuse the law in order to provide an oportunity to destroy a competitor because Oracle is run by bad people.

> There was no loss.

And that's probably what determined the result. The courts are not run by stupid people, they don't like that the system is exploited.

Re: Courts: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime

#60

Post by chatmasta »

dragonwriter wrote: post #33
chrisshroba wrote: post #10

Does anybody know how this pertains to data scraping? Like many coders/tinkerers, I've been frustrated that TOS'es often forbid bots from scraping data from many sites. There are lots of ways data can be better visualized or synthesized than is currently done, but terms of service make this impossible (unless you're just doing a small side project you never plan to publish). Does this mean that scraping is acceptable…

> Does this mean that scraping is acceptable now, even if a site's TOS explicitly forbid it? That...depends. It was a scraping case, but while the appeals court allowed the automated access that the lower court found violated various anti-hacking laws, it also let stand the copyright violation judgement for the actual use of the scraped content. So, if content is protected by copyright, you don't have a license which…

If you’re scraping from multiple sources and aggregating the data, you might be able to make a fair use case.
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