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.
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.