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Making ToS actually ToS and not a federal law.


jayc3399

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"Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren proposes a change to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) which would remove the felony criminal penalty for violating the terms of service of a website and return it to the realm of contract law where it belongs. This would eliminate the potential for prosecutors to abuse the CFAA in pursuit of criminal convictions for simple violations of a website's terms of service."

 

The rest of the article can be found here: http://www.theatlant...ons-law/267247/#

 

I think this presents an interesting idea in terms of the bot makers Jagex prosecuted. If something like this is to go through, even though its in the states, it redefines the way you can handle things.

 

And truly making bots and the like is breaking the ToS, "No foul" has truly happened to Jagex, they mess up the ingame economy but that doesn't hurt Jagex as a company. Unless you can argue that they have lost customers but I'm not sure how that would hold up.

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Most of the convictions Jagex got had little to do with ToS - it had to do with intellectual property rights, copyright infringement and the like.

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I think this brings copyright into ToS agreements, its contract law instead of federal penalties.

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Can't people already go to jail for violating contracts? I'll agree that contract violation is not quite the same as copyright infringement, but there's no guarantee that relegating the TOS of a website to contract law will prevent people from going to jail and being branded felons.

 

Also, that article was fairly biased as it was written by a friend of the deceased. Not to minimize the tragedy of an obviously talented young man taking his own life, but I think I'd like to see something from a more factual point of view before making further judgement (no pun intended).

Edited by Kaida23
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So, Kaida is the real version of every fictional science-badass? That explains a lot, actually...

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  • 4 weeks later...

Why was this ever not the case?

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Why was this ever not the case?

This, basically.

 

I was under the impression that website TOC were not legally binding in this sense, and I thought that (way off-topic) that court case over that suicide of Megan Meyer over myspace stuff. Morally awful, but nothing illegal about lying about your name on facebook.

 

In any case, it's ridiculous to think that website or video game terms of service should be law. The government should make laws, not Jagex/facebook/whatever.

 

@Kaida, my understanding is that he used a guest access account from MIT, which they provide. MIT had a JSTOR subscription which was extended towards guest accounts and public users (sensible, it is sometimes a pain or takes awhile to have computer login info sorted out. I'm at a small school and didn't get a log-in thing for a few weeks). Users can download pages for research and stuff.

 

Swartz used a script to quickly download a large percent of their library. At this point the TOS was violated.

 

I believe the now-subsided internet outrage was that logging on to a freely-provided guest account and saving files became a CPAA felony because he downloaded them arbitrarily faster than he could have without a script, and that the sum of legal actions shouldn't be something illegal because of the intensity.

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