Using a workaround for buggy or misconfigured hardware is very different from "these guys told me to stop using their thing, but I can circumvent the measures they put in place to stop me."
EDIT: related quotes from the ruling
"Craigslist gave the world permission (i.e., “authorization”) to access the public information on its public website.... it rescinded that permission for 3Taps."
"3Taps had to circumvent Craigslist’s IP blocking measures to continue scraping, so it indisputably knew that Craigslist did not want it accessing the website at all."
"3Taps’ deliberate decision to bypass that barrier and continue accessing the website constituted access “without authorization”"
The court decision relied on the clarity of intent from 3taps. They had been both expressly told not to do something, and technically blocked from doing it. Their access to CL wasn't accidentally broken, they didn't misunderstand what they had been told in the C&D letter, and they didn't get caught by some surprising technicality. They had been clearly told to stop, and they circumvented the measures put in place to stop them.
I said elsewhere: this is more or less equivalent to a store telling me not to come back and distributing my photo to staff... and then me shaving my beard and changing my clothes in order to sneak back in. Shaving and changing my clothes are not illegal in and of themselves; trespassing is illegal, and shaving and changing my clothes are the tools I chose to use in my effort to trespass.
No. If you read the ruling at [0], you will find you are quite mistaken.
This decision was not about changing IPs; it was about "whether Craigslist had the power to revoke, on a case-by-case basis, the general permission it granted to the public to access the information on its website" (in the analogy, whether the store can revoke my individual permission to enter.) The court agreed that CL has the power to revoke authorization to access its site.
The decision does not reference the IP ban for its own sake, but always as a part of a multi-step argument, best articulated on page 10. "3-Taps (1) received a personally-addressed cease-and-desist letter stating that it could not access Craigslist’s website “for any reason”; (2) discovered that it could no longer access the website at all from its IP addresses; and (3) was sued for continuing to access that website after circumventing the IP restrictions. A person of ordinary intelligence would understand Craigslist’s actions to be a revocation of authorization to access the website, and thus have
fair notice that further access was “without authorization.”" The decision is quite clear in its focus on the access being "without authorization".
In the analogy, the court would not reference shaving my beard in isolation, but in the context of my being personally told not to come back, discovering that security turned me away after recognizing my photograph, and then making a "deliberate decision" to enter the store through the mechanism of shaving my beard and changing my clothes in order to avoid being denied entry. The court would make it quite clear that the problem was my re-entry to the store.
> If you read the ruling at [0], you will find you are quite mistaken.
I hadn't read the ruling, just Kerr's post, and yeah I'm only more confused now, considering some of Kerr's comments. I'm just going to give up on it for today, no more time.
EDIT: related quotes from the ruling
"Craigslist gave the world permission (i.e., “authorization”) to access the public information on its public website.... it rescinded that permission for 3Taps."
"3Taps had to circumvent Craigslist’s IP blocking measures to continue scraping, so it indisputably knew that Craigslist did not want it accessing the website at all."
"3Taps’ deliberate decision to bypass that barrier and continue accessing the website constituted access “without authorization”"