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Password Sharing = Crime? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/01/is_passwordlending_a_cybercrime/ Columnist Mark Rasch, in an article "Is Password Lending A Cybercrime" published in The Register, is critical of a recent decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the judge found that the defendant violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In that case the defendant, Berkshire Information Systems, obtain a password to a competitor's website from a client of website's owner, Inquiry Management Systems. The client who shared the password had a contractual obligation not to share the password. In his analysis, Rasch notes: "Under this decision, anytime you share your userid and password you're potentially committing or facilitating a felony. If you subscribe to, for example, the New York Times website (a free login) and let someone else log in with your userid, you might end up in the slammer - at least if you appear before Judge Buchwald." If that is so, then logging into a newspaper website with a borrowed password could potentially get you into the dock facing a criminal charge depending on the circumstances. The language in the statute includes "intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization" in its language and one would suppose that if you knowingly use somebody else's password to access a system, you are accessing the system without the owner's authorization. The law does require a showing that the unauthorized access by one or more persons caused damages or losses during a one year period of at least $5,000 in aggregate value. Borrowing you spouse's password to access a news site once probably wouldn't trigger the statute, but what about using a password from a website like www.bugmenot.com which advertises "Bypass Compulsory Web Registration" and states that it has liberated 66,191 sites? (Note: Bugmenot.com links to an ironic article at the New York Times website recommending Bugmenot.com -- ironic because the New York Times requires registration to see its content and charges $12.50 for an eight week subscription to its electronic edition.) One might then suppose that in the Southern District of New York, using a password from Bugmenot.com could be risky. There is a potential for a case to be made that the aggregate value of hundreds of people using shared passwords deprives the site owner of marketing information valued at over $5,000 or the value of electronic subscriptions that in the agregate are worth more than $5,000, triggering the statute. However, it is pretty early in the legal analysis to predict outcomes. Until several District Courts rule on similar cases and until these cases wind their way through the appeals process, we won't have much predictability in how the law is likely to be applied. That said, this may be a shot over the bow warning us that we really ought to be careful not to borrow or lend passwords. Posted by WEBnME @ 4/30/2005 12:41:00 PM 
Permanent Link: http://www.webnme.com/2005/04/password-sharing-crime.asp SHARE: 
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