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A sense of proportion is what is missing | 559 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
A sense of proportion is what is missing
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 18 2013 @ 03:38 PM EST
You are presuming the legislation was "poorly worded" rather than "intentionally vague". I doubt that. There are too many cases where when laws are applied in unjust ways they are claimed to be "poorly worded".

One website published a different wording with the intent of fixing the problem, and to me it looked just as broken.

The current legislation distinguishes between "having no authorisation", "having authorisation" and "exceeding authorisation". The intention is quite clearly. Let's say Groklaw resides on some computer. I have authorization to access the computer because the software on the computer responds if I type in "groklawstatic.ibiblio.org". But there are many parts on that computer that I shouldn't access. So if I managed to delete all groklaw posts, that would be "exceeding authorisation". And everyone will agree that action should be punished.

Now lets say Groklaw has some Terms of Service that say "no swearing". So someone could claim that by swearing in a post I violate the TOS, which makes my post "exceeding authorisation", which makes me a criminal. The same kind of criminal as someone creating significant damage. That is (I hope) not intended, but that is the case.

The change in the law should be to not say "authorised to access a computer", but "authorised to access or modify specific data on one or more computers in specific ways". There would be no "exceeds authorisation". For example, I have authorization to modify the database of all groklaw posts by clicking the "submit" button. I have no authorisation to modify the database by hacking the server and deleting everything. My posts would be "authorized access" no matter what I post - TOS violation would be a TOS violation, but it would not be a crime.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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