“Netflix and Chill” could be put on hold while the Feds figure out if you and your special someone were sharing passwords.

Three judges from the 9th District US Court of Appeals have ruled that sharing passwords is a criminal act, which basically means just about everybody in the U.S. is a known federal criminal, so to speak.

These rulings are part of a larger case called United States vs. Nosal, which was a case dealing with a former headhunter who used the password of someone still working at the company he had just left to access a large database of information be used at his new firm, which is not all that dissimilar to what the St. Louis Cardinals hack dealt with. Nosal was charged in 2008 with hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, though several of those charges were thrown out in 2011 and he was eventually convicted of the remaining federal charges two years later.

The new ninth circuit went 2-1 in favor of the Government, but the dissenting argument is something worth reading.

From Judge Stephen Reinhardt,

“This case is about password sharing. People frequently share their passwords, notwithstanding the fact that websites and employers have policies prohibiting it. In my view, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) does not make the millions of people who engage in this ubiquitous, useful, and generally harmless conduct into unwitting federal criminals.”

For the record, streaming services and practically every service that use password protection encourage users not to share their passwords with anyone, but would any decent human being believe that sharing the password to their Amazon Prime account to be essentially a federal crime?

The Ninth District Court of Appeals encompasses California, Alaska, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Nevada, Idaho and Hawaii, and is only binding there. Nosal could still take this ruling to the Supreme Court.

[Fusion]

About Matt Lichtenstadter

Recent Maryland graduate. I've written for many sites including World Soccer Talk, GianlucaDiMarzio.com, Testudo Times, Yahoo's Puck Daddy Blog and more. Houndstooth is still cool, at least to me. Follow me @MattsMusings1 on Twitter, e-mail me about life and potential jobs at matthewaaron9 at Yahoo dot com.