How Is Legal Acquisition Of Data On The Net Defined?

[sanctus]

I was wondering lately how making stuff illegal on the net actually works from the legal perspective.

I mean whenever you upload you site with your content then you choose to make it public. Then if someone downloads your content (or copies your html and js-scripts and layout) you can sue them for theft of data,ideas etc.? How is this possible since you in the first place uploaded your stuff?

Taking it one step further, you build a scraper (some web-spider, bot) which fetches content from a given domain with a longish interval (so that it is not ddos, if you slow down their domain then it is logic that they can sue you for that). If you then use the scraped data, you can depending on the domain, also get sued (if for instance you never cite the source). Again do not understand how this works, it is not that you click on some "Agree with Terms and Services" which they can take you on.

Last step, you hack into some government sites (or any other other password protected domain), just to look (emphasize "look" otherwise it can be a bnational security issue, which is obvious why one can be sued) at the data (like the guy, he says so at least, who hacked into the pentagon just to see whether area51 and aliens exist). Did you sign any terms and services agreement, that it is not allowed to try to find password to get in? What can they use against you, it is them who put stuff online in the first place; behind a password ok, but to get to that window where they ask you for the password all you need is have a browser and a net connection, nowhere terms and services.

NB.: I understand that you can compare this, mainly the last step, to break into a house and I agree. What I wonder about is how it works legally, because in the case of the house there is all these legal stuff like "private property", etc. whichis well defined

 

[Super Polymath]

Well it depends on data and where the individual is connecting from. really. There's a maddening spiral of legal channels so I can't help you without a plethora of specifics, unfortunately.

 

Addendum: I hate rules and like to break them. If you play your cards, you may just be able to break them too. That is after all, what the legal system is all about. ;)