Their argument is that violating a website’s terms of service is equivalent to accessing the website “without authorization and in excess of authorized access”, and is thus a federal crime in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This radical, convoluted interpretation is a cataclysmically bad idea. It twists the law to the breaking point, and sets one of the worst precedents in the history of the internet.
This is how bad it is: MySpace is dictating federal law. Under their TOS, anyone with inaccurate personal information on their profile could be prosecuted for the same crime. And this isn’t limited to MySpace; any website’s TOS would be enforceable under the CFAA. Hardly anyone reads the Byzantine legalese of TOSes, and the consequences of disobedience now reach far beyond simply having your account deleted.
I could draft a TOS that says “no bitching about all the pink”, and if you criticized the color scheme, you could be imprisoned for five years.
About Me
My Tumblelog - when I feel there isn't enough to blog about.
"A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing...really just a way to quickly publish the "stuff" that you run across every day on the web"
This tumblelog is piped into Facebook as well.
![pratham [dot] name](http://10.media.tumblr.com/avatar_f7d76c901179_30.png){kind=avatar}
