Digital Media and Data Privacy Law Blog

Zounds, right?  But that is arguably what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in Facebook v. Power Ventures, Inc. on July 12^th.  Let’s get to it.

Facts

Power Ventures and its CEO Steven Vachani operated a social network called Power.com. The concept was simple. People using other social networking sites could create a Power account to aggregate the user’s social networking information. The users could keep track of a variety of social networking friends through a single program and click through the central Power website to ... Read More 

When we last left David Nosal, he had escaped liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after convincing some of his former colleagues at executive search firm Korn/Ferry to use their log-in credentials to download source lists, names and contact information from a confidential database and transfer that information to Nosal.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that violating Korn/Ferry’s policy against disclosing confidential information did not amount to violations of the CFAA, and overturned his convictions under that law. 

But the government ... Read More 

We don’t usually talk about four-year-old court decisions in the first instance here.  But the Ninth Circuit has issued a pair of noteworthy opinions interpreting the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the last few weeks.  And to understand those it will help to understand United States v. Nosal, 676 F.3d 854 (9th Cir. 2012), an en banc opinion authored by Judge Kozinski.

Facts

The facts are mercifully short.  David Nosal used to work for Korn/Ferry, an executive search firm.  Shortly after he left the company, he convinced some of his former colleagues who were still working for ... Read More