> Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game to figure out what plays they like to use?

Did you have to impersonate someone who's supposed to have access to it in order to watch it? That seems more like the question that would decide it.

"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right?

> there's no subterfuge going on

"I want API access."

"We only give that to drivers."

"OK, I'm a driver."

"OK, here's API access"

Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?

Is it impersonation if I just don't go in wearing the opposing team's colors? What if I go wearing the playing team's jersey? What if I'm the coach of that other team so I wear a hat and sunglasses? Where's the line of "impersonation"?

This can't be taken as an absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't", even if they're able to find a way to make this technically legally binding.

Morality does NOT require us to give up as soon as someone tries to block us.

>"Because they don't want you to" is a bad way to phrase it, even if it gets to the core of things. After all, they wrote their license agreement based on what they want you to do, right?

Sure. I'm not disputing that this was almost definitely a technical violation of the CFAA. The CFAA is a disgustingly overbroad and outdated law, and Lyft finagling their process to get under its cover shouldn't be a moral indictment of Uber. [The bright side of this is that if similar lawsuits start coming out against some other big players, the law might finally change.]

Are licensing agreements automatically eval'd into moral absolutes? If we take such a strict position we can never win against any moderately powerful entity.

The path to ascendancy for most companies involves "avoid a lawsuit", because frequently there are laws on the books that could take them down. Google is a great example; their conduct technically violates the CFAA and rampantly violates copyright, even though the courts ended up giving them a pass in Perfect 10 v. Amazon because they're afraid to shut down Google.

>Are you going to argue that Uber's devs could've had that theoretical conversation without being intentionally deceptive?

I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception".

When you enter business, you know you are entering a competitive market where part of the game is getting an advantage over your competitors, and their attempting to do so over you. Concocting a complex legal apparatus that gives some meat to any potential lawsuit between competitors is routine. It doesn't affect the morality of the process, despite the theatrics of the court.

You're playing with the words, rather than the meaning behind them, and you're smart enough to know that. You're mixing up morality and legality a lot, which I find interesting. I wouldn't say that they have much to do with each other. I'd consider corporations (generally speaking) as amoral entities, striving against the bounds of punishment under the law, and the law as an amoral construct acting as the buffer and interface between other entities (individuals, corporations, other nations). Its job is to act in the interests of the people, one aspect of which is encouraging, but also regulating, the competition in the market. Working toward an even playing field, and correcting when it falls short of providing that.

> I'll argue that it doesn't cross the threshold from "deception required to be basically functional in a competitive environment" into "immoral and personally compromising deception".

I'd argue that it crosses the threshold into behavior that should fall outside the bounds of legal competition. We're better off with many weaker competitors than we are with one strong one.

That's the funny thing about this. I completely agree that we're better with many smaller competitors. The CFAA, like most such laws, is routinely used to stop small competitors. The CFAA is a huge reason that tech incumbents are able to keep their de-facto monopolies, exactly because they make up licensing agreements that say "Reading our site means you swear you won't compete against us" and then send out a firm full of $1k/hr lawyers to do their dirty work.

An "even playing field" would not put force of law behind such fantastical, unrealistic, and anti-competitive assertions. Signing up for the other guy's ToS is not something that would fire off moral alarm bells in your average person. It's naive to believe that anyone adheres to these absurdities, and you have to be a huge company to enforce them.

The false belief that businesses actually restrain themselves to align with such regulations instead of fighting hard to get in a winning position is exactly what leads to damaging laws like the CFAA in the first place.

The net effect is that small innovators get obliterated and denounced for trying to get some leverage while companies playing in the hundreds of millions (Lyft and Uber) can squabble in court before deciding to save some dough and draw up a settlement that says they'll stop accessing the other guy's API (at which point they'll find a proxy or replacement).

So I'm trying to answer to you in this light.

Who has legal property of the data in question : Obviously, Lyft. Does Uber, by accessing this data, benefit from it : obviously, yes. Do they, by accessing the data, deprive Lyft from the use of this data ? At first glance, the answer would be no : when you access data, you don't remove it. However, one of the benefits of owning data is to be able to sell it. By accessing this data, Uber removes or lowers the ability for Lyft to sell this data to Uber. In a more general way, one of the benefits of property is to enjoy the sole use of the owned item. Uber violates this.

Now let's look at deniability : Did Uber know the owner of the data did not want them to access it : yes, obviously. Did Uber get access to this data without seeking it ? No, they deliberately sought to access it. Did Lyft put in place barriers to restrict access to this data, and give a clear warning about who was to use it ? Yes, they did.

> This can't be taken as an absolute unless we concede that we must say "OK" just because they say "Please don't"

Well, our laws work like that for pretty much every other aspect of property laws. The owner's only responsibility is to make sure that potential users know the thing is not up for grabs.

This is exactly the flawed analogy that incumbents use to keep anti-competitive legislation like the CFAA and extreme copyright regimes in place, but it doesn't work.

>Well, our laws work like that for pretty much every other aspect of property laws. The owner's only responsibility is to make sure that potential users know the thing is not up for grabs.

They don't universally work like that for public places or businesses. There are significant restrictions in how access to public businesses can be restricted, as well significant accessibility and regulatory requirements before such a place is authorized to open (even if the building is not open to the public). Property owners have to put up with a lot of crap they don't like from their tenants and/or customers. There are whole sectors of law dealing with this.

Beyond that, we're not talking about real/physical property. We're talking about sending copies of bits around. The mere fact that Lyft could've hypothetically charged Uber for access to these bits is not really relevant. Unless Lyft can make an argument that Uber's access was materially disruptive, it should be A-OK in my book. We don't need to adhere to a broken analogy.

When you open for business, you're making a deal with the community. That deal is not well-represented by the CFAA. This is one of the rare instances when the CFAA is being deployed against the larger company, but that doesn't make it a fair law, and note that you still have to have gazillion dollars to consider a suit under this; no garage-based startup is going to be benefited by the CFAA. Drop this one and get Uber on something they deserve to get gotten on.

These problems can all be discussed in the prism of restraining property rights for public benefit (e.g. restriction of copyright for quoting). In Uber's case, though, there is no public interest in restraining Lyft's rights.

> They don't universally work like that for public places or businesses. There are significant restrictions in how access to public businesses can be restricted, as well significant accessibility and regulatory requirements before such a place is authorized to open

None of these regulation relate to liability of potential thieves, but to public safety. In our case, this would mean Lyft may be on the hook for not protecting drivers' and users' data, not that the person appropriating these data is not also on the hook.

> The mere fact that Lyft could've hypothetically charged Uber for access to these bits is not really relevant.

Property laws very specifically state that the owner is entitled to the fruit of his property. You may criticize the whole ownership system, but this is a clear cut case of Uber appropriating data that they didn't create. The only question here is whether the terms of access Lyft gave to third parties was explicit enough for Uber to understand that it had no right to this data, and whether Uber also understood this fact.

> When you open for business, you're making a deal with the community.

The nature of that deal is codified in the terms of service. While most terms of service may be seen unfair towards customers, in this case, 1) Uber is not a customer and 2) the aspects of the terms that were violated are hard to consider unfair.

There are plenty of exceptions that could/should be discussed in the scope of CFAA : scientific/historian work, hacking that benefits the customer and/or the owner, work of arts, etc. I would welcome amending the law in this light.

Uber's action fits none of these legitimate uses, and is actually a good example of why CFAA was introduced in the first place.

The public interest is in maintaining a fair and open market. You can't blind your competitors and expect to get beneficial competition.

IMO we need to be much more aggressive about this and err toward keeping the market accessible for new entrants v. keeping an ideologically-pure sanctum for corporate property rights. The powerful will always use try to use their influence to get the government enforcing rules that are to their benefit.

If you think it's absurd for Target to be able to issue a blanket ban on Walmart employees shopping in their stores in order to "protect their intellectual property", you should think this is absurd too. "But, Target could've sold information about their stores to Walmart! Walmart employees are stealing by going in there without their Walmart hats on!" Give me a break.

You're speaking in favor of treating intellectual property identical to real property. It doesn't work that way. Information can co-exist without diminishing or blocking anything, whereas occupation or usage of real property cannot.

Some IP rights are reasonable, but contrary to real property laws that merely codify the natural human behavior to protect and preserve physical property, IP contradicts the natural human impulse to spread information far and wide. "Information wants to be free" and all that. IP is a government-granted monopoly on information, and it's something we should be very wary about.

>None of these regulation relate to liability of potential thieves, but to public safety.

That's because no theft is occurring. Theft requires illegally taking something. Uber hasn't taken anything or caused any actual deprivation. The theory that they maybe COULD HAVE sold it to Uber is ridiculous. We can't protect everything based merely on its hypothetical, untested market value; the fact is that Lyft was giving this away.

>The nature of that deal is codified in the terms of service. While most terms of service may be seen unfair towards customers, in this case, 1) Uber is not a customer and 2) the aspects of the terms that were violated are hard to consider unfair.

I disagree, I think they're easy to consider unfair, and I think people would readily agree if the parties had swapped positions.

>Uber's action fits none of these legitimate uses, and is actually a good example of why CFAA was introduced in the first place.

The CFAA was introduced after a panic caused by the Matthew Broderick film War Games. "The internet" was not something that the public had even heard about, let alone had in their homes. It was intended to prevent hacking into military, industrial, and financial computer systems.

Should we accept that, e.g. Lyft send some of their employees to be recruited at Uber and then leak the info back to Uber ? That's, afaik, illegal.

You must realize that, while you criticize CFAA for promoting big business, a small company will never have decent means to resist an unrestricted corporate warfare.

By creating a clear delimitation between what in your information system is public, and what is private, CFAA allows smaller companies to protect information critical to their business (not IP, private info), so that they don't have to invest in oversized devensive methods.

> the fact is that Lyft was giving this away.

Lyft was giving this away to business partners with whom they had contractual relations. Uber impersonated contractors, and violated these contractual relations.

Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game [...]

No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber.

What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose?

There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.

Uber certainly has people in the legal department to study such things. They also clearly have accountants calculating if the chance and cost of being caught is greater than the rewards of breaking the rules.

I worked at a big corporation. The legal department was not a morality watch dog. Accounting would have a cow and decide x needed to be changed, legal would try to come up with justification for how we can defend this in a court of law if sued.

And Lyft can access Uber's API, unless they're scrupulously avoiding doing so for legal reasons, which doesn't seem all that likely. There's a lot of stuff that is technically illegal, but we'd all be paralyzed if we followed the letter of the law (or every contract we sign) precisely. I'm sure Lyft and Uber BOTH understand this, as they're both generally operating in direct violation of local taxi regulations.

It's funny to read so many people acting like violating a ToS is some moral horror, apparently unaware that the ToS is routinely violated by normal usage, and that like most contracts, they're intentionally written that way. The goal of this, as all contracts, is to a) have a reason to sue someone they dislike and b) have a defense against suits from someone that dislikes them. Since the user has no individual/direct bargaining power, the contract will always be massively favorable to the company.

Businesses sue each other for breach of contract all the time. It could even be argued that this is not fundamentally immoral, which is why it's a civil matter; disagreements in business will sometimes occur, and resorting to the civil dispute resolution system that's in place for exactly this reason is not necessarily a sign of malfeasance.

No one reads ToS except lawyers, and then only when they're looking for something to sue over and/or decide how much likely they're going to get sued. Like most contracts, it doesn't become a consideration until something goes south.

In the football analogy, the opposing team could easily concoct a situation where a ToS prevents an opposing team member from watching the video of the game by creating an interstitial landing page that says "You must agree to the Terms to view this site", the person checking OK, and then viewing the video that technically was prefixed by mandatory agreement to a document that buried language like "This video must not be used against us in any way." under 50 paragraphs of boilerplate. This is unfair because they were able to say "Please don't compete with us, k?" in a potentially technically legally-binding way? Come on now.

>There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.

OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.

A very convenient excuse, which is precisely why I don't find it convincing. Please spare me your patronizing explanations of Terms of Service; having already studied law they're not very impressive.

OK? It's not zero-sum just because some are happy and some are sad.

Win-loss outcomes are zero-sum by definition. I don't see this discussion going anywhere productive from here.

Do you have an argument that's not "it was unfair because it was technically illegal and Lyft probably didn't like it"? Maybe there'd be a more impressive answer if you could offer a more impressive proposition.

>Win-loss outcomes are zero-sum by definition. I don't see this discussion going anywhere productive from here.

This is pure fantasy. Win-loss is an unavoidable fact of any competition. You are competing because you are trying to get the the same limited resource (in this case, the market for a ride-hailing app). That's what makes it a competition.

Giving up because you don't like competing is the same as a loss. The entity that gets that portion of the resource won, and the entity that didn't lost. A loss doesn't have to be wholly unprofitable, but it's still a loss.

You have arbitrarily defined all competitions as fundamentally zero-sum. You say they're zero-sum by definition: the definitions I know of win means that someone has gained something and loss means that someone has either failed to gain something they wanted or lost something they had (not necessarily in proportion to the person who won).

This is only zero-sum if you believe that all resources could be utilized equally well in anyone's hands. This is not even communistic or socialistic where a central authority decides the appropriate way to allocate resources, it's just anarchy.

Only in a very restricted framework. If one side goes out of business and one side only makes a minor gain (and lots of remaining competition exists), that is obviously not zero sum from any perspective

In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong.

I think I disagree that there was no subterfuge in the Lyft case? I don't actually know this, but I assume that if Lyft knew this was happening, they would behave differently, and if the drivers knew this was happening, they would behave differently.

If you do something that you know a lot of other people would care a lot about, it is in my opinion your responsibility not to try to conceal it from them. If it's not difficult, as in this case, you should notify them explicitly.

I agree. The implicit context is that it is in-bounds to investigate your competitors through their public-facing offerings, even if they try to stop you. You don't have to stop competing just because they say please. Through an accident of law (the CFAA was enacted before it was possible to get home internet service), Lyft was able to make this illegal. Lyft is trying to block public information from getting into their competitor's hands. IMO, that's the anti-competitive activity here.

But that's not a public API that Uber was tapping into. It was a private API that requires an agreement to be signed in order to access it. Uber signed and then violated the agreement, by providing fake data through the APIs.

At the moment that the agreement was broken, their access to the API become illegal.

That's outright fraud to gain access.

This isn't some kind of gray area like you're trying to pretend.

On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia.

It's not "win at all costs". It's "win at some costs"; in other words, a competition with some rules.

Business is a competition and your competitors are going to be looking for and actively exploiting the advantages they can get over you. This necessarily requires you to look for advantages you can get over them or just cede the market, and if you're willing to do that, there's no point in competing in the first place.

It's sad how HN is here demanding meticulous adherence to a clause buried deep in the incumbent's ToS and pretending that violating it is some basic moral misdeed.

Probably because the context for a "TOS violation" is very different between a large company and an individual, and because the motives for this violation are venal. And because Uber is a serial violator of pretty much every rule it comes into contact with. I doubt you'd find many here who would see a problem with, say, a researcher violating the same clause to get data for a research project.

Large companies can afford lawyers to read TOS documents. Normal people don't have the time or expertise to read them, usually. And who writes TOS documents in the first place? Large companies. It is a double standard if a company wants their TOS followed, but breaks other companies'. So it is coherent to argue that large companies have a higher burden to follow a TOS more "meticulously" than individuals do.