Definition of California State Law for Internet Trespassing
California is at the forefront of enacting laws prohibiting and criminalizing computer and Internet tampering and in using existing laws of trespass to apply to cyberspace. While the criminal law is fairly straightforward, there have been some important cases in civil court, where companies or individuals have been successfully sued for using online information for unauthorized purposes. This area of law is based on case law, not the penal code, and is still evolving.
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Criminal Law
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Criminal acts of computer or network trespass and tampering are dealt with in the California penal code. Under California penal code section 502, the following actions are crimes: damaging, destroying or changing data to defraud or deceive people; taking or copying data from a computer or computer network; using computer services without permission; changing, deleting or destroying data on a computer or network; accessing or helping to access a computer or network without permission; introducing viruses into a computer or network; and using the Internet domain name of someone else to send viruses that cause damage to a computer or network.
Penalties
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The maximum penalty, if found guilty for criminal computer trespass, is a fine of $10,000 and a prison sentence of three years. The owner of the computer or network that has been damaged or suffered loss can also sue in civil court for compensation. Compensation can include any money spent to repair, replace or verify the condition of the computer or network, or to verify what data was stolen, deleted or tampered with, and attorney's fees. If the damage was caused by a minor, the parents may be sued and will be responsible for paying any damages.
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Civil Trespass Laws
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Recently, a number of court decisions have allowed the trespass to chattels law to be applied to Internet trespass in civil law. A chattel is normally a tangible possession, and the trespass to chattel laws were designed to prevent people from tampering with another's physical property. However, in a landmark case, Thrifty-Tel v. Beznek, the California Court of Appeals found that unwelcome electronic signals transmitted over a telephone network could be trespass to chattels. In Thrifty-Tel, a small telephone company was overwhelmed by unauthorized transmissions, which caused customers to be unable to use the phone network for a period of time. This decision was applied to websites in two more California cases.
eBay v. Bidder's Edge
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Bidder's Edge operated an online auction website that listed information on items being auctioned from many different online auction sites and wanted to use information from eBay. Bidder's Edge used a search robot to search for auction data and copy the relevant information over to the Bidder's Edge website. However, eBay and Bidder's Edge could not reach an agreement allowing Bidder's Edge to use data from eBay, so eBay sought an injunction to stop Bidder's Edge from gathering information from the eBay website. The court granted the injunction based on a claim of trespass to chattels. The court found that the unwanted web searches were a violation of the right to exclude others from interfering with your property.
Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.
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Tickets.com provided event information to the public on its website, although it did not sell tickets to events. Tickets.com used an automated spider to search Ticketmaster's website and copy information about events from the Ticketmaster site onto the Tickets.com site, and created links to send visitors directly to the event pages on Tickemaster's website. Ticketmaster sued for unauthorized use of the spiders to search and copy information from its website and for providing unauthorized links to its site that allows visitors to bypass its main page (which featured paid advertising). Here, the court found no damage to Ticketmaster from use of the spider and refused to allow a claim of trespass to chattels.
California Internet Trespass Law
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In criminal law, matters are clear. Anyone interfering or tampering with a computer or network, or with the data on that network, faces a criminal conviction. However, for interference with web pages, the situation is not yet clear. Copying information from one web page to another may be a civil crime of trespass to chattels.
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References
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