I can have a site on the public internet and ban certain people from visiting it, then enforce that in court if they do?
That seems... strange.
The actual legal details may be different, but that's how I see this case.
So if you "shout" on a public square (blog, post, etc.) you can't tell which group of people can and can not hear what you say.
The bar example would be fit for websites that raise paywalls, or some sort of access control.
That's idiotic, it's just another case where the judge is 20 years behind current affairs, he is judging something he clearly doesn't understand.
Craigslist told a patron they couldn't come in any more. The patron put on a fake mustache and tried to come in the back door.
Would you support someone scraping a blog to repost it elsewhere? Do you support crawlers that don't respect robots.txt? I don't see a problem with Craigslist saying 'No, you can't scrape our users content to post on your website'.
The exact details of which laws and how the court case went may not be correct, but at a theoretical level the website as open-to-public bar/store/etc is a perfectly valid analogy.
Fake mustaches for everyone!
It's actually pretty narrow. If you have received sufficient notice that you are no longer allowed to access a resource (in this case, the cease and desist letter), then you can't use technical measures to mask who you are and try to access the resource.
> It's actually pretty narrow. If you have received sufficient notice that you are no longer allowed to access a resource, then you can't access the resource.
Isn't the ruling considering automated scraping in some way different from normal browsing?
They don't have any reason to, so they don't, but they could.
It's hilarious that you would claim that one strained meatspace analogy is completely wrong, and your other strained meatspace analogy is completely right.
This is why laws in one context should not be mapped by analogy over to another context; they should be derived from the fundamental moral principle that the original law codified.
An open bar to the public? At a bar you have a degree of physical contact which conveys info you can not have via internet, that's why the 'square' example fits better (imho). But example apart, I'm with you on this: the court case sets a dangerous precedent.
I'm so tired of hearing this from hackers who have never taken a law class or picked up a book. Many hackers are abysmally ignorant of the law, and not all that good at critical thinking either. Some of those won't even listen to an explanation of how it does work, but double down on their ignorance and throw a tantrum instead.
If I have a house and certain people are visiting it against my will, then I have legal recourse to prevent them from doing so.
That it's digital doesn't really change the fact that, at the least, what 3taps was doing maps to trespassing. (Theft, at the worst, but I'm wary of invoking the 'copying isn't theft' mantra).
You cannot have a house in a public space accessible worldwide, without doors or windows, and then randomly get to decide who can and can't visit, and have it enforced by courts.
If we're extrapolating from commercial property rights, then again, stores and merchants have the right to refuse entry to persons they choose as well, even though those buildings are in common areas, and their doors are commonly unlocked to allow free entry to all.
Further, it is not incumbent upon you to have doors, windows and locks to prevent entry from your property, as the property needn't be a house at all, but could simply be land. I have the right to expel trespassers from land I own, whether or not any dwellings or structures exist upon such property.
Even if you're assertion is just that I should have doors and locks to prevent them entering just my home, that is again a false claim. Whether or not my property is secure might be a matter of insurance liability, but does not obviate me from the expectation that others will respect my property rights. Even if I have no doors, windows, locks, or even walls, I have the right to expel others from my property.
Legally, it isn't.
"You cannot have a house in a public space accessible worldwide, without doors or windows, and then randomly get to decide who can and can't visit, and have it enforced by courts. "
Completely and totally false. Trespass to land, in fact, doesn't even require that you intend to trespass, only that you voluntarily traveled to the location. You do not need to know it's someone else's property or that you are trespassing to be liable.
Getting injunctive relief is more difficult for other reasons, but you would at least get nominal damages.
I think you will find trespass to land doctrines are not in your favor in this argument. You may want to try to argue it isn't like land at all :)
We had this discussion here on HN some days back when the ruling came down. Just because something is possible doesn't give you the right to do it.
It's worth noting that this is different than just misconfiguration hacks, where somebody gains access to something completely private because the server allowed it. I agree that in those circumstances, no culpability should be found on the part of the 'hacker'. However, in this case, Amazon said "Hey you. What you're doing? Stop it."
Moreover, they did so with a letter written by their attorneys. Not legally binding, sure, but at the same time, a pretty clear illustration that the access wasn't wanted.
EDIT: I googled it because I could smell the wrong in my statement, it's not called copyright it's called "database right" because a compilation of facts is not a creative work. Still the right is real regardless of the distinction.
EDIT2: CraigsList is a US company and apparently if you read deeper into the WikiPedia article, US copyrights do not respect databases and so it's not a real thing. Sorry for muddying the waters, but it doesn't change that service providers can have terms of service irrespective of how strongly they work to identify and segregate their users.
And in most cases, in the areas I've lived in, you have no right to refuse service to "certain people". So, yes, this seems just as bad as a baker who would refuse a certain subset of people from even entering his shop.
I think it varies by state, but as long as the banning isn't because you're part of a protected class[1], a private establishment can refuse service for any reason it sees fit, including none at all.
In any case, I was just correcting your analogy, not your premise.
Just because the door is open doesn't mean that everyone is welcome to go through it. The same holds true for websites just as it holds true for grocery stores.
The way that works is that someone entering a public shop has implied license to be on the property. But that implied license can be explicitly revoked to exclude specific people.
Presume they were scraping the data to /dev/null, would that still be an issue?
Further, aren't some things INTENDED to be scraped? Like their RSS feeds?
Then again, the Obama administration wants to make it a felony to stream compyrighted material, so maybe the conflation isn't so outrageous after all.