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Re:Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal... by infogulch on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @02:34PM (#22740839)
A webmaster can deny any kind of access they don't want by just not serving to them, just like a landowner can put up a fence. People on the outside can still look over the fence from a public space perfectly legally, like a webmaster serving their homepage to everyone, and the landowner can't demand of people outside the fence, for example, "You can look over the fence, but only if you don't make a mean face at me". If you don't want people to look at all, well, don't make it public and put up a wall instead, and require authorization to enter.

If the landowner voluntarily allows someone inside, they can have pretty arbitrary rules about what people are allowed to do inside (in addition to the actual law), but the only real recourse they have to enforce their arbitrary rules once broken is to evict an offender to the outside. They don't get to pretend that their arbitrary rules are suddenly laws punishable as if they were a crime.

Re:Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal... by wang_li on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:22PM (#22744976)
> A webmaster can deny any kind of access they don't want by just not serving to them

You’d think that but Microsoft just lost a lawsuit over some company scraping LinkedIn that they tried to block.

Re:Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal... by infogulch on Tuesday March 31, 2020 @10:47PM (#22745104)
Building a fence, and then leaving an open gate with a sign saying "Anyone that wants to look at my garden can come in, as long as you pinky promise not to take pictures", and then proceeds to leave it unmonitored, does not give the landowner the right to prosecute people under the law for having a photo of the garden. (Watch me be wrong about this :P)

Or more plainly, it's the webmaster's own responsibility to "just not serve" if they don't want it to be served, and their failure to implement their own desires as software doesn't suddenly give them carte blanche to claim whatever they want was breaking the law.

In this case, the data is effectively public. Sure you have to "tell them your name" and "agree to ToS", but neither of those requirements are binding the applicant to tell the truth. So Microsoft chose a method of authorization that is unfit for the purpose of keeping people they don't want to have access out of their system. "But but but how else would they keep people off?" I don't know, but it doesn't matter. Make people sign a contract under supervision of a notary, or validate their drivers license, or whatever. The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables.