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

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 gives you info and then you have to check a TOS that you might not even know exists is foreign to me. But when I talked with a young programmer they kind of agreed with Oracle saying “otherwise you could just request everything from every possible address.” They were unfamiliar with war drivers or even how early web crawlers started.

Note that the decision says that violations are not criminal acts, but that doesn't mean that license violations can't result in civil lawsuits and encumbent financial damages.

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 intelligent adults, sadly) to believe in the supremacy of illegitimate authority has been going on for a while now. Now those kids are starting to become adults. So, of course, you're starting to see bullshit like the CFAA1986 (and it's downright laughably broad definition of a 'protected computer') and the DMCA (likewise) starting to be abused like they are. The "don't copy that floppy" music video was the thin edge of a wedge that continues being driven into the heads of kids and adults alike, even today.

"... the bounds of criminal law should not be defined by the preferences of website operators. And private companies shouldn't be using criminal laws meant to target malicious actors as tool to enforce their computer use preferences or to interfere with competitors."

If a website operator wants to control if a user can access the website, then there are ways to do this without resorting to criminal prosecution.

Through server software, websites can control how fast HTTP requests can be made in succession or how many requests can be made in a single connection.

Websites can further control what IP addresses have their HTTP requests fulfilled.

But users can still utilize client software to make automated requests and comply with any of these restrictions.

The user might just send the requests slowly or from a different IP address.

Ultimately, no website can force a user to use a GUI, mice or touchcreens. The same as no website can force a user to use a particular browser.

If a website wants to control how a user accesses the website, there is no way to enforce this under the criminal law.

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 now, even if a site's TOS explicitly forbid it?