Supreme Court Finally Limits Widely Abused Computer Hacking Law... But Just A Bit

For many years we've written about the problems with the CFAA. That's the supposedly "anti-hacking" law, with both civil and criminal components, that makes it a violation to use a computer in a manner that "exceeds authorized access." Law enforcement and the courts in the past often (though not always) took an extremely broad read of "unauthorized access" in a such a manner that basically all sorts of cases that involved a computer included CFAA claims. And even if all the other claims fell away, the CFAA claims often lasted, which is why it has been dubbed "the law that sticks." Part of the underlying issue is that law enforcement and some courts wanted to read "unauthorized access" to include using a computer system you had legitimate access to, but for unauthorized purposes.

Famously, this has included cases around not abiding by terms of service that were never read, seemingly benign password sharing, scraping your own data off a web page, and perhaps most troubling of all, downloading too many files.

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