Robert Crawford out further Congressional efforts to defend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — for record companies. Observe:
One Congressman wants to legalize cracking — so long as it’s a big corporation breaking into your computer.
While content owners now can try to block access to intellectual
property pirates, they cannot use the range of technological options
that they want, chiefly because some tactics are illegal under state and
federal law. Berman’s bill would legalize some techniques over the
protests of file-sharing advocates.
This brought a question to my mind. Given that (I believe) we’ve already got laws on the books against unauthorized entry into computers owned by somebody else, has any consumer ever actually tried to get a company prosecuted under criminal law for spyware or other intrusive programs?
These cases always seem to be discussed in terms of consumer privacy and consumer protection statutes — but in actual spyware cases where a program is transmitting data back to a company without the users consent, why wouldn’t there also be a violation of anti-cracking statues?
Anybody with any case references and/or legal opinions, please chime in…
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technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.