Banned users beware

[Deal]

Druff has the law on his side:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-575...-violates-law/

[BetCheckBet]

would also mean druff would get in trouble for times he has done this himself

[son of lockman]

Pretty hard to enforce and they'll have to build a million new prison cells.

[Steve-O]

Also bad news for US players playing on foreign poker sites.

[Dan Druff]

Druff has the law on his side:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-575...-violates-law/

This isn't saying that it's illegal to change your IP to access a site. It's just saying that the lawsuit by Craigslist can move forward. The law has not changed.

I'm actually on Craigslist's side on this one. Some scumbag was using bots to scrape content from their site and offering it on their own site. Craigslist told them to stop, and banned their bots' IPs, and they kept circumventing it. This is a content theft issue, not an issue regarding one's ability to read a site that wants them blocked.

As someone who runs a website where the public can provide content (i.e. the forum), I am very much FOR criminalizing IP blocking circumvention for purposes of pahticipiating, but NOT for purposes of reading.

That is, if I ban and IP ban you here, and then you use another IP to make a phony account to continue posting here, that should be a criminal offense considered the equivalent of online trespassing. This is because you are changing the content of my website (i.e. posting on it) after being told that your contributions are not welcome. I am not saying that it should be illegal for banned users to come back under another name (I've been guilty of that myself on 2+2), but that a user who has been explicitly banned, IP banned, and told never to come back, should be guilty of a criminal offense if he continues to circumvent the ban and keeps posting on the site.

I do NOT think it should be illegal for anyone to read, watch, or listen to content on the internet that is otherwise available to the general public. For example, if I IP ban you here, and you change your IP simply to lurk and continue reading what I post here, that should not be illegal. This is because you are not changing the content of my site, and because you are not accessing a subscription-only area for free. You are accessing free-to-the-public content and not interfering with it, and that should not be illegal.

It should definitely always be illegal to change your IP in order to scrape content to provide on your site for profit, after the site you're scraping it from has told you to stop.

[Kuntmissioner]

Pretty hard to enforce and they'll have to build a million new prison cells.

Not that hard to enforce. Many victims themselves will be able to provide to authorites enough evidence of their own gathering to secure an indictment.

Not sure what the 1M prison cells are for, though. Fuck sending people to jail for trolling. They should just be killd.

Bestow italics rep below...