Parenthetically, Wired does really good reporting on law and policy related to cyber commerce, cyber security, Big Brother, and a frightening tendency of prosecutors to turn all sorts of online activity into crimes.

Prosecutors in a New Jersey ticket scalping case are pushing the envelope on the federal computer hacking law, setting a precedent that could make it a felony to violate a website’s terms of service and fool a CAPTCHA, according to electronic civil rights groups intervening in the case.

Automated CAPTCHA image analysis was done by a company in order to buy large numbers of concert tickets. Essentially, bands want to sell tickets at below market prices directly to fans without scalpers getting involved. This creates a huge incentive for scalpers to find computerized ways to buy huge numbers of tickets in a short period of time.

In this case the scalpers were prosecuted. Violate the terms of service of a web site? You could go to jail. This is insane. How many people who use a site legitimately bother to read the terms of service? Somewhere between few and none. So how can this be a contract? Also, why should this sort of contract violation be a crime?

Certainly the web opens up the possibility to much more massive automated parallelized and fast misbehavior. But not all misbehavior should be a federal crime. On what basis should a particular act be considered worthy of a federal prosecution? The law should be reasonable and predictable. This prosecution seems unpredictable.

Another point: In the grand scheme of bad things that happen on the web this seems like small potatoes. Want to go after people who cause huge losses for others so they can make much smaller gains? How about spammers? They steal the time of literally billions of people every day. Make and enforce some laws against them.