News US court rules proxies, IP switching illegal

From my understanding, no it wouldn't.
It would only make it illegal if you received a cease and desist letter from the company running the site you are trying to access by changing your IP.

 

One of the additional things to consider in the case was that Craigslist sent a cease and desist demand to the scrapping service in question in ADDITION to the IP blocking.

At the very least if there ever actually were a suit/case over circumventing IP blocking, this existing opinion is likely not to weigh very heavily at all.

 

To add, both the Bittech and several others have rather hyped up coverage of it. If you read the decision and the language of the US CFAA it requires DELIBERATE circumvention. Simply having a dynamic IP isn't going to trigger that. Nor would changing your IP unless it is SPECIFICALLY aimed at avoiding IP blocking.

Granted, this could mean that the CFAA would apply to people using a proxie to access services not allowed within their country (deliberate circumvention), which many people do (and regional locking is generally pretty damned stupid).

As I mentioned in my other comment though, the additional fact of a C&A letter in this case is an additional consideration, not simply that the IP was blocked and proxies were then used to access Craigslist.

 

It's a US law that has no jurisdiction in the UK at least for now until the UK end up following suit.

 

Yea but being the UK we probably wont bother with having to have cease and desist letters.
We will just do something dumb like "nudging" ISP's into blocking access to anything that changes IP's, after all we don't want kids circumventing any filters their parents have setup.

 

As long as unblock-us stays legal for UK folks

 

My concern with this type of ruling isn't that it's going to be enforced across the board, but that it gives the federal government very broad discretion that it can use later in some specific case where they are clearly in the wrong. For example a whistleblower might easily slip up at some point and use a public network in a way that could be construed as bypass of a block.

 

It has been said by many people many times, you would need to have received a cease and desist letter, and you would only be breaking the law if you continued to circumvent the IP blocking after having received the notice telling you to stop.

 

This kind of ill thought out and frantic grasping for control of an increasingly disillusioned population isn't going to work.

It's just going to piss people off, the more control you employ the less you will ultimately have.

Analogy time: Grasping a live wet fish, the more you grip, the more it wriggles, the less control you have!

 

Yea i tried reading the PDF on the ruling, but it isn't worded very well.

And i think this maybe where the confusion comes in, the part you quote from the ruling first mentions the C&D letter and then the IP blocking. As sad as it sounds, i think the key here is the semicolon after the first statement..

So would this mean the first statement is equal or greater strength, is the wiki saying the left and right boundary is taken from the semicolon ?

 

Well putting the grammar and punctuation aside for a moment, as we could be here forever trying to work out if the semicolon is used with the intent of linking related clauses, if it was meant as introductory, or a joined coordinating conjunction.

In the same document the judge states "In contrast, the average person does not use “anonymous proxies” to bypass an IP block set up to enforce a banning communicated via personally-addressed cease-and-desist letter."

The key wording being IP block setup to enforce the C&D.

 

I couldn't care less tbh how people like to read these rulings. The way I see it, the US-rulings in general are often worded very badly and leave tons of room for interpretation.

Nevertheless, when I was a little boy in the 80's, I allways looked forward to travel to the US or maybe apply for a greencard. Nowadays I wouldn't set foot onto US-territories unless I'm forced to.

The US becomes more and more of a big-brother-state and is allmost as bad as Russia, China etc nowadays. Way to go for the so called "free world".

 

Paying to Netflix but not contributing to the licence fee demanded by the media distributors. That is if they're charging Netflix per subscriber as opposed to a flat rate.

 

of course netflix would not sue, but the movie industry?