The Proposed “Cloud Computing Act of 2012,” and How Internet Regulation Can Go Awry

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Goldman.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a new bill, the “Cloud Computing Act of 2012” (S.3569), that purports to “ improve the enforcement of criminal and civil law with respect to cloud computing.” Given its introduction so close to the election, it’s doubtful this bill will go anywhere. Still, it provides an excellent case study of how even well-meaning legislators can botch Internet regulation.

What the Bill Does

From its 1980s origins as a law restricting hacking into government computers, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) has morphed into a general-purpose federal law against trespassing on anyone else’s computers. With that breadth, the CFAA extends to a wide variety of activities, ranging from data scraping (see, e.g., EF Cultural Travel v. Explorica) to fake profiles (see, e.g., the Lori Drew prosecution related to Megan Meier’s death) to ex-employees walking out the door with competitively sensitive information (see, e.g., US v. Nosal and WEC v. Miller)…

The proposed bill’s main substantive provisions attempt to give “cloud computing services” extra protections under the CFAA. First, the bill says that each unauthorized access of a cloud computing account counts as a separate CFAA offense. Second, the bill specifies a formula for computing losses in CFAA violations involving cloud computing services, setting a minimum floor of $500 loss per affected cloud computing account…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2012/10/02/the-proposed-cloud-computing-act-of-2012-and-how-internet-regulation-can-go-awry/