US District Court in Washington, DC, has ruled that violating a website’s terms of service isn’t a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
US District Judge John D. Bates in Sandvig v Barr (Civil Action No. 16-1368) said
Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website’s terms of service “is a law unto itself“, would raise serious problems.
Full text of the ruling is available here.