It's just not that dire yet. For one, the court hasn't ruled yet. This is purely LinkedIn's argument, and they're allowed to argue anything they want. They c

It's just not that dire yet. For one, the court hasn't ruled yet. This is purely LinkedIn's argument, and they're allowed to argue anything they want. They could argue that hiQ isn't allowed to access their service because the company name doesn't start with a capital letter if they wanted to. They wouldn't win, but they could make the argument. Secondly, if you read the context of the case, this is not a situation a normal person is at all likely to find themselves in. hiQ was specifically sent a cease and desist, which is why "bypassing an IP block" is couched in "intentionally and knowingly". IANAL, but a follower of the law, and my layman's reading of that is that LinkedIn is intentionally scoping this to only target subjects that have previously been sent a cease and desist. And finally, even if they did do that, it's unlikely to impact VPNs for streaming. I severely doubt that any first world country would extradite one of their citizens to the US to face charges for bypassing an IP block. Within the US, I still doubt the charges would be used like that even if they could. I don't think this is something the FBI is going to spend resources on proactively tracking, so it would be up to Netflix et al to push the cases. I really strongly doubt they would do that. "Paying Netflix customer sued by Netflix for watching content he wasn't supposed to" is a really bad PR headline, and it's mainstream-adjacent enough to get picked up by major news networks. That's a really hard story to spin, and I strongly suspect the bad PR would cost much, much more than people try to avoid region-locks (who are likely to just pirate it if VPNs become CFAA-able).