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Are there any legal implications about publicly admitting that you are knowingly violating a site's Terms of Use? It is surprisingly hard to search for existing

Are there any legal implications about publicly admitting that you are knowingly violating a site's Terms of Use? It is surprisingly hard to search for existing precedents if you don't already have a decent knowledge of legalese.

A1kmm 13y ago
Disclaimer: IANAL, talk to a lawyer if this is more than a hypothetical question. Under US law, the 9th circuit held in a criminal case that an employee who violates employer computer access policies with intent to defraud and by that action furthers the intended fraud and obtains something of value. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-10038/10-10038-2011-04-28.html http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-... The 1st Circuit held in a civil case found grounds to uphold an injunction against someone redistributing data obtained from a scraper on the grounds that scraping public data in the circumstances exceeded authorised access, and that the data was something of value that would harm the target website. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/58/608331/ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/... I don't think these laws are a good thing, but the reality is that US courts have found that accessing websites for purposes beyond the terms of services with 'intent to defraud' violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Defrauding could potentially mean misleading people into following you on Twitter if having Twitter followers is valuable for marketing. The OP's post could be introduced as evidence by Twitter that he intended to exceed authorised access, that he had intent to defraud, and that he knew his actions were harming Twitter. I think the OP would be well advised to take legal advice on whether to shut down the site now and / or retract the blog post (although it might be too late to suppress it now, given how many people have seen it and possibly archived it).

A1kmm 13y ago

Disclaimer: IANAL, talk to a lawyer if this is more than a hypothetical question. Under US law, the 9th circuit held in a criminal case that an employee who violates employer computer access policies with intent to defraud and by that action furthers the intended fraud and obtains something of value. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-10038/10-10038-2011-04-28.html http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/10-... The 1st Circuit held in a civil case found grounds to uphold an injunction against someone redistributing data obtained from a scraper on the grounds that scraping public data in the circumstances exceeded authorised access, and that the data was something of value that would harm the target website. http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/58/608331/ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/318/... I don't think these laws are a good thing, but the reality is that US courts have found that accessing websites for purposes beyond the terms of services with 'intent to defraud' violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Defrauding could potentially mean misleading people into following you on Twitter if having Twitter followers is valuable for marketing. The OP's post could be introduced as evidence by Twitter that he intended to exceed authorised access, that he had intent to defraud, and that he knew his actions were harming Twitter. I think the OP would be well advised to take legal advice on whether to shut down the site now and / or retract the blog post (although it might be too late to suppress it now, given how many people have seen it and possibly archived it).