Isn't a password supposed to be like a key in the real world? Can I share my car or apartment keys with my family and friends or can a government forbid it? I don't think so.
Luckily I don't live in the US where a government / judge seriously considers something ridiculous like this. And if I would live there I would happily just give a sh**
Nothing in this ruling says otherwise. I think the MacRumors article above, along with the other media sources it cites, is misreading this. This is, in the words of the ruling, what this case is about:
Put simply, we are asked to decide whether the “without authorization” prohibition of the CFAA extends to a former employee whose computer access credentials have been rescinded but who, disregarding the revocation, accesses the computer by other means.
This is not about password sharing, but rather if authorization which is specifically rescinded, then "gotten around" by password sharing, is a violation of the CFAA.
Making it even clearer, the next paragraph:
Nosal and various amici spin hypotheticals about the dire consequences of criminalizing password sharing. But these warnings miss the mark in this case. This appeal is not about password sharing. Nor is it about violating a company’s internal computer-use policies. The conduct at issue is that of Nosal and his co-conspirators, which is covered by the
plain language of the statute. Nosal is charged with conspiring with former Korn/Ferry employees whose user accounts had been terminated, but who nonetheless accessed trade secrets in a proprietary database through the back door when the front door had been firmly closed. Nosal knowingly and with intent to defraud Korn/Ferry blatantly circumvented the affirmative revocation of his computer system access. This access falls squarely within the CFAA’s prohibition on access “without authorization,” and thus we affirm Nosal’s conviction for violations of § 1030(a)(4) of the CFAA.
"Affirmative revocation" is key to this case and is the reason why this ruling went the way it did in including CFAA. The affirmative revocation of access is what makes this fraudulent.
Later:
And, pertinent here, [the defendant's arguments] would remove from the scope of the CFAA any hacking conspiracy with an inside person. That surely was not Congress’s intent.
Remember: the Court's job is to follow the letter of the law, with the small gaps filled in by reasonable interpolation of Congress's intent in passing the law. Clearly Congress intended for an inside trade secrets divulging attack like this to be covered by the CFAA. It is not clear (and not discussed in this case other than in the "slippery slope" arguments made by the defendants) that Congress also intended to prohibit sharing of, ex, Netflix passwords etc.
At this point, this ruling has no pertinence to the situation which the defendants brought up. The law is still exactly what it was before; the ruling has just filled in the details on corporate insider hacking where authorization had been specifically revoked by the owner of the data.
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i think that netflix and hulu et al would be well within their rights to protect their revenue streams. I think this is easily fixed with tiered pricing based on devices. Base membership includes 2 devices, plus is 4, premium is 6, family is 8 or whatever. When that additional device attempts to log in, a dialog comes up offering to upgrade for $x. These companies are in the content delivery business, not the free and easy transfer of knowledge business.They have costs like content acquisition and server upkeep. Why shouldn't they make more revenue on more people using their services?
Tiering is already available, in the form of simultaneous streams.
Hulu allows one (1!!!) stream at a time from an account. You can stream multiple "non-Plus" content streams, but only one subscribed content stream. This is why it is silly to pay for, ex, Showtime through Hulu (pay the same price directly to Showtime and you can stream to three devices at once). Hulu's "tiering" is "You want another stream? Subscribe again!" (which is user-hostile and insane, but whatever).
Netflix offers multiple tiers, based on the number of simultaneous streams. I believe the low-end offering is 2 simultaneous, and goes up from there.
Amazon Prime I believe has a hard cap of 3 simultaneous streams per account.
Cable providers, on the other hand, don't seem to have this type of coordination going on.
