How often does this actually happen? You might get handed an infringement notice, and your ISP might terminate your service if you're really egregious about it, but I haven't ever heard of someone actually being sued for downloading something.
It's no idle threat, and they will win if it goes to court.
Although, one could argue what OpenAI & Meta are doing is closer to the torrent definition than the "simply downloading" definition, given that they're using that to redistribute information to others. It'll be an interesting case.
This clearly needs some sort of regulation or policy.
It's clearly pretty bullshit if you ask chatgpt for a joke and it repeats a Sarah Silverman joke to you, while they charge you a subscription for it and she gets none of that sub money.
If that's not what you're saying, I don't understand your point. Is it the difference between the phrases "would be" and "could be," or even "should be"?
Did you hear about Aaron Schwartz?
I believe JSTOR sued him to prevent him from releasing the downloaded materials, worried he had offloaded the papers separately from the laptop. The final blow was an outrageous set of charges by the federal government. I also recall several prominent leaders in the open source movement calling it out for what it was, a power trip to make an example of a "digital terrorist". Such a shame.
The relevant law here, the CFAA, is often referred to as the US law that criminalizes "hacking", but what it specifically does is criminalize anyone who "intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access" which is much more broad than how technical disciplines might use the word.
So yes, stealing a password off a friend's post-it note and Hasselhoffing their instagram might not be considered "hacking" if you're hanging out at Defcon, this would be considered "hacking" in legal or colloquial terms.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Potato, potahto. Or, like kids these days say it, "corporate wants you to find differences between these two pictures...".
Fact is, from the POV of the legal system, "using a guest account that had legal access to" a system, but to which (the account) you didn't have legal access, would typically be seen as hacking. So is running curl in a loop, if it results in you getting sued for it. So is just guessing the URL (e.g. incrementing a user ID in a GET query param), if it lets you access things you shouldn't be able to.
Yes, it's not aligned with how technology works. But it is aligned with expectations of behavior, which is what the law is really about.
I don't think that is accurate.
He had legal access to the account. The account had legal access to the service.
The argument was that downloading articles en masse was an _abuse_ of the service, which was a violation of the Terms of Service and therefore a CRIMINAL ACT.