...and the coffee shop doesn't block your number. Also, a phone call consumes, as a percentage of available resources, vastly more than an HTTP request. Disre

...and the coffee shop doesn't block your number. Also, a phone call consumes, as a percentage of available resources, vastly more than an HTTP request. Disregarding that though, I think you'd need a court order telling someone not to talk to you, and you'd have to take action to prevent them as well, blocking their number and tell them to stop before that would be granted. If they persisted after being told explicitly and having their number blocked, then yes, I do think legal action would occure and be swift. I would also assume, presumably, that "you" can be extended to be an automated phone system. (Which is still more limited in capacity than a server would be, but even disregarding that.) FWIW, I'm not saying that "hiQ Labs" is blameless or acting in good faith. I'm saying that unimpeded access to publicly accessible information requires more than asking someone to stop and that the CFAA isn't the right tool for this. I'm not an expert in this field, but I doubt the vast majority of anyone in this thread is. It also becomes interesting because I believe the CFAA has been used in similar situations before, but those were where the accessed knowlege could be assumed to be private, even if made public (client details at a phone company, or articles known to be behind a paywall) (and not that I agree with its usage there either, but the data accessed there could be assumed, by a reasonable person, to not be public). So the key thing here is: if something is publicly available, can I ask you to stop looking at it, or do I need a more stringent court order to prevent you from viewing public information? And in this case, I do think the capacity constraints disregarded above would come into play. I think the courts would look differently at someone calling your clerk 20 times a day vs looking at a menu you post on the window.