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Kids these days love to Netflix and Chill in their free time. Perhaps they’d be a little less inclined to do so now that a federal appeals court ruled “chill” is short for “chill in a federal penitentiary for a period of seven to ten years.”
That’s right. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals says sharing your Netflix password is a federal crime.
The ruling comes from a decision in U.S. v. Nosal issued last week.
The case stems from David Nosal, who used a former coworker’s password to access a database after he left a company.
Nosal was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and eventually sentenced to one year in prison.
He appealed the conviction, but last week, the Court ruled against him, finding that using a password given to you without the consent of a company, or passing it out without similar permission, can be a criminal act.
Here’s the majority.
In the face of multiple circuits that agree with our plain meaning construction of the statute, the dissent would have us ignore common sense and turn the statute inside out. Indeed, the dissent frames the question upside down in assuming that permission from [Jacqueline Froehlich- L’Heureaux, Nosal’s assistant who gave him access] is at issue. Under this approach, ignoring reality and practice, an employee could willy nilly give out passwords to anyone outside the company—former employees whose access had been revoked, competitors, industrious hackers, or bank robbers who find it less risky and more convenient to access accounts via the Internet rather than through armed robbery.
True. So the act of sharing a password you haven’t been given express consent to share by, say, Gmail, Netflix, or HBO, is basically illegal.
The lone dissenting judge, Stephen Reinhardt, wrote that this ruling could potentially criminalize a number of actions.
Thus § 1030(a)(2)(C) covers untold millions of Americans’ interactions with these objects every day. Crucially, violating (a)(2)(C) does not require “any culpable intent.” Therefore if we interpret “without authorization” in a way that includes common practices like password sharing, millions of our citizens would become potential federal criminals overnight.
This case is about password sharing. People frequently share their passwords, notwithstanding the fact that websites and employers have policies prohibiting it. In my view, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) does not make the millions of people who engage in this ubiquitous, useful, and generally harmless conduct into unwitting federal criminals.
While Netflix probably won’t start asking the feds to go after password sharers, they technically could now.
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[Via Fusion]