Legal Research

Not Reading a Website?s Terms Of Service Shouldn?t Make You A Criminal

By Pamela

Raise your hands if you read every word of a website’s terms of service?  I thought so.  Hardly anyone.  Well,  there are several recent cases that use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to turn actions like not reading (& therefore not complying in every detail with)  a website’s terms of use into crimes.  A Techdirt blog entry discusses the cases, one filed by Facebook and one filed on behalf of Ticketmaster, that invoke the CFAA to support criminal prosecutions.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group, has filed an amicus brief in the Ticketmaster case that “argues that this prosecution expands the scope of the CFAA beyond what Congress intended, grounding criminal liability in whatever arbitrary terms of service that websites decide to impose on users.”  Of course, it does.

There’s not enough time in the day to read every website’s terms of service.  So just handcuff me now.

[PRM]

Full post as published by Cocky Law Blawg on July 07, 2010 (boomark / email).