this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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He was being charged under the CFAA, a hacking criminal statute that prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems. It was controversially being stretched to cover Aaron's conduct that violated TOS by an ambitious prosecutor.
Are TOS violations felonies now?
Yes, technically any TOS violation is one ambitious prosecutor away from a felony, thanks to the CFAA.
Can I make my own TOS that corporations agree to when they endorse a check I pay a bill with?
You certainly can! And they will discard that check, charge you for failure to pay your bill, and refuse to negotiate with you in any way.
I’m thinking they endorse those checks without reading every single detail on the check.
If you want to read about how we got into this fucked up situation I'd recommend The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (a notorious cyberpunk sf writer among other things) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101
That's uh... It makes sense if you don't think about it. The access was probably authorized, the use wasn't.
There is a difference between illegal and unauthorized. If I go into a store that doesn't allow trying on the clothes before you buy and I try a shirt on, I haven't broken a law. It still isn't authorized. The store can throw me out, but I shouldn't be charged with shoplifting.
What Aaron was doing wasn't even unauthorized. He was just doing more of it than they liked. In the example above, it would be like bringing 20 (or 2000...) pieces of clothing to the change room when there's a 5 piece limit. Again, it shouldn't be illegal, and the site could have enforced account limits if that was their issue instead of relying on bandwidth limits doing the job for them.
Now, the only thing left to question is how he hooked up the computer doing the downloading. I don't know about the legality of that, but he was accused of illegally accessing the website, not the university network, so I'm guessing even the prosecutor who was trying to expand the scope of the DMCA law didn't see a way he could charge him with anything on that front.