>I take issue with the notion that someone who is accessing a service through a public interface is criminally responsible for downtime if too high an access ra

>I take issue with the notion that someone who is accessing a service through a public interface is criminally responsible for downtime if too high an access rate causes service degradation or an outage Ah... well surely you've heard of people being prosecuted for denial of service attacks? Most recently, members of anon getting raided because they used LOIC? If you use a network in a way that is intended to degrade others' quality of service, even if you are just accessing things via normal protocols at a really high rate, you are breaking the law. In this case, it does not look like they are alleging that he intended to cause a service disruption, but they claim that he repeatedly circumvented measures that JSTOR put in place to halt his unauthorized activities, which caused service disruptions for other legitimate users and therefore denial of service.