throbber
No. 19-783
`IN THE
`Supreme Court of the United States
`
`NATHAN VAN BUREN,
`Petitioner,
`
`v.
`UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
`Respondent.
`
`ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI
`TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
`FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT
`
`BRIEF OF THE R STREET INSTITUTE, PUBLIC
`KNOWLEDGE, LINCOLN NETWORK, ENGINE
`ADVOCACY, THE INNOVATION DEFENSE
`FOUNDATION, AND THE AMERICAN ANTITRUST
`INSTITUTE AS AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF
`PETITIONER
`
`JOHN BERGMAYER
`PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
`1818 N St NW Ste 410
`Washington, DC 20036
`
`J. SCOTT MCKAIG
`LINCOLN NETWORK
`44 Tehama St
`San Francisco, CA 94105
`
`ABBY RIVES
`ENGINE ADVOCACY
`700 Pennsylvania Ave SE
`Washington, DC 20003
`
`CHARLES DUAN
`Counsel of Record
`R STREET INSTITUTE
`1212 New York Ave NW Ste 900
`Washington, DC 20005
`(202) 525-5717
`cduan@rstreet.org
`
`RANDY M. STUTZ
`AMERICAN ANTITRUST INSTITUTE
`1025 Connecticut Ave NW Ste 1000
`Washington, DC 20036
`
`Counsel for amici curiae
`
`

`

`TABLE OF CONTENTS
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`TABLE OF AUTHORITIES .
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`INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE .
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`SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT .
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`ARGUMENT .
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`I. Broad Construction of the CFAA Enables Anticom-
`petitive Conduct .
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`A.
`Incumbent Companies Can Directly Block Com-
`petitors from Entering the Market .
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`B. Online Platform Operators Can Copy and Then
`Foreclose Innovative Startups .
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`C. CFAA Assertion Limits Consumer Choice and
`Facilitates Unfair Pricing .
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`II. Conflicts with the Intellectual Property Laws Show
`That the Broad Construction of the CFAA Enables
`Anticompetitive Behavior .
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`A. Trade Secret Law Requires Secrecy Tradeoffs
`That the CFAA Disregards .
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`B. Copyright Law Incorporates Balances and Ex-
`ceptions Not Found in the CFAA .
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`C. Statutory Text and Legislative History Con-
`firm that the CFAA Was Not Intended to Su-
`persede Intellectual Property Law .
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`III. The CFAA Should Be Construed Narrowly to Ex-
`clude Terms of Use as Conditions of Authorization .
`A. A Narrow Construction of the CFAA Better
`Ensures Competition .
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`B. Existing Contract Remedies Render the Broad
`Construction Superfluous and Excessive .
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`CONCLUSION .
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`(i)
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`

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`TABLE OF AUTHORITIES
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`CASES
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`. 14, 20–21
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`. 18
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`Bison Advisors LLC v. Kessler,
`No. 14-cv-3121 (D. Minn. Aug. 12, 2016)
`Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.,
`510 U.S. 569 (1994) .
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`Craigslist Inc. v. 3Taps Inc.,
`942 F. Supp. 2d 962 (N.D. Cal. 2013) .
`Defiance Button Machine Co.
`v. C & C Metal Products Corp.,
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`759 F.2d 1053 (2d Cir. 1985) .
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`EF Cultural Travel BV v. Explorica Inc.,
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`274 F.3d 577 (1st Cir. 2001) .
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`Electro-Craft Corp. v. Controlled Motion, Inc.,
`332 N.W.2d 890 (Minn. 1983)
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`Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc.,
`. 7–9, 21
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`844 F.3d 1058 (9th Cir. 2016)
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`Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.,
`499 U.S. 340 (1991) .
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`Fire ’Em Up, Inc.,
`v. Technocarb Equipment (2004) Ltd.,
`799 F. Supp. 2d 846 (N.D. Ill. 2011) .
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`Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc.,
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`510 U.S. 517 (1994) .
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`Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises,
`471 U.S. 539 (1985) .
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`HiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp.,
`938 F.3d 985 (9th Cir. 2019) .
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`Impression Products, Inc.
`v. Lexmark International, Inc.,
`137 S. Ct. 1523 (2017) .
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`(ii)
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`(iii)
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`. 11
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`. 18
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`. 26
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`I.M.S. Inquiry Management Systems, Ltd.
`v. Berkshire Information Systems, Inc.,
`307 F. Supp. 2d 521 (S.D.N.Y. 2004)
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`Institute of Veterinary Pathology, Inc.
`v. California Health Laboratories, Inc.,
`116 Cal. App. 3d 111 (Ct. App. 1981)
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`Isbrandtsen Co. v. Johnson,
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`343 U.S. 779 (1952) .
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`Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp.,
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`416 U.S. 470 (1974) .
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`Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,
`568 U.S. 519 (2013) .
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`Munaf v. Geren,
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`553 U.S. 674 (2008) .
`nClosures Inc. v. Block & Co., Inc.,
`770 F.3d 598 (7th Cir. 2014) .
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`Ryanair DAC v. Expedia Inc.,
`No. 17-cv-1789 (W.D. Wash. Aug. 6, 2018)
`Scott v. United States,
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`79 U.S. (12 Wall.) 443 (1871)
`Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,
`464 U.S. 417 (1984) .
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`Southwest Airlines Co. v. Farechase, Inc.,
`318 F. Supp. 2d 435 (N.D. Tex. 2004) .
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`Southwest Stainless, LP v. Sappington,
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`582 F.3d 1176 (10th Cir. 2009)
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`Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp.,
`306 F.3d 17 (2002)
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`Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken,
`422 U.S. 151 (1975) .
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`

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`United States v. D’Amato,
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`39 F.3d 1249 (2d Cir. 1994)
`United States v. Microsoft Corp.,
`253 F.2d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001) .
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`United States v. Nosal,
`676 F.3d 854 (9th Cir. 2012) (en banc) .
`Ward v. TheLadders.com, Inc.,
`3 F. Supp. 3d 151 (S.D.N.Y. 2014) .
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`(iv)
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`CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISION
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`U.S. Const. art. 1, § 8, cl. 8 .
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`STATUTES
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`17 U.S.C. § 102(a)
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`——— § 102(b)
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`——— § 107 .
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`——— § 201(a)
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`——— § 302 .
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`——— § 506(a)
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`——— § 902(a)(1) .
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`——— § 1301(a)(1)
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`18 U.S.C. § 1832 .
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`——— § 1836(b)(2) .
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`——— § 1836(b)(3) .
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`——— § 1839(3)(A) .
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`——— § 1839(3)(B) .
`Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA),
`18 U.S.C. § 1030 .
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`. 4–28
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`

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`(v)
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`Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA),
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`18 U.S.C. § 1030(b) .
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`——— § 1030(c)(2)(B)(i)
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`——— § 1030(g) .
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`Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA), Pub. L. No. 104-
`294, 110 Stat. 3488 .
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`Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 207 (1979) .
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`Sherman Act,
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`15 U.S.C. § 1 .
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`——— § 2 .
`U.C.C. §§ 2–302 (2002) .
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`OTHER SOURCES
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`142 Cong. Rec. 27104 (1996)
`Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling
`Service Switching (ACCESS) Act of 2019, S. 2658,
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`116th Cong. (Oct. 22, 2019) .
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`Patricia L. Bellia, Defending Cyberproperty, 79 N.Y.U. L.
`Rev. 2164 (2004) .
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`Volodymyr Bilotkach, Reputation, Search Cost, and
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`Airfares, 16 J. Air Transport Mgmt. 251 (2010)
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`Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox (1978) .
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`Henry N. Butler, REMS-Restricted Drug Distribution
`Programs and the Antitrust Economics of Refusals
`to Deal with Potential General Competitors, 67 Fla.
`L. Rev. 977 (2016) .
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`. 9–10
`Michael A. Carrier, Sharing, Samples, and Generics: An
`Antitrust Framework, 103 Cornell L. Rev. 1 (2017) .
`Susan A. Creighton et al., Cheap Exclusion, 72 Antitrust
`L.J. 975 (2005) .
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`

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`(vi)
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`Cory Doctorow, Adblocking: How About Nah?,
`Electronic Frontier Found. (July 25, 2019) .
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`———, Adversarial Interoperability, Electronic
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`Frontier Found. (Oct. 2, 2019) .
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`Frank H. Easterbrook, Statutes’ Domains, 50 U. Chi. L.
`Rev. 533 (1983) .
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`. 6, 28
`Niva Elkin-Koren, Let the Crawlers Crawl: On Virtual
`Gatekeepers and the Right to Exclude Indexing, 26
`U. Dayton L. Rev. 179 (2001) .
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`Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, Search,
`Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet,
`77 Econometrica 427 (2009)
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`

`

`In the Supreme Court of the United States
`
`No. 19-783
`
`NATHAN VAN BUREN,
`Petitioner,
`
`v.
`UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
`Respondent.
`
`BRIEF OF THE R STREET INSTITUTE,
`PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE, LINCOLN NETWORK,
`ENGINE ADVOCACY, THE INNOVATION
`DEFENSE FOUNDATION, AND THE
`AMERICAN ANTITRUST INSTITUTE AS
`AMICI CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF
`PETITIONER
`
`INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE
`The R Street Institute1 is a nonprofit, nonpartisan
`public policy research organization. R Street’s mission
`is to engage in policy research and educational outreach
`that promotes free markets, as well as limited yet effec-
`tive government, including properly calibrated legal and
`
`1Pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 37.3(a), all parties received ap-
`propriate notice of and consented to the filing of this brief. Pursuant
`to Rule 37.6, no counsel for a party authored this brief in whole or in
`part, and no counsel or party made a monetary contribution intended
`to fund the preparation or submission of the brief. No person or
`entity, other than amici, their members, or their counsel, made a
`monetary contribution to the preparation or submission of this brief.
`
`1
`
`

`

`2
`
`regulatory frameworks that support Internet economic
`growth and individual liberty. R Street’s particular focus
`on Internet law and policy is one of offering research
`and analysis that show the advantages of a more market-
`oriented society and of more effective, more efficient laws
`and regulations that protect freedom of expression and
`privacy.
`Public Knowledge is a nonprofit organization dedi-
`cated to preserving an open Internet and the public’s
`access to knowledge, promoting creativity through bal-
`anced intellectual property rights, and upholding and
`protecting the rights of consumers to use innovative
`technology lawfully. As part of this mission, Public
`Knowledge advocates on behalf of the public interest for
`a balanced copyright system, particularly with respect to
`new, emerging technologies.
`Lincoln Network is a nonprofit organization that
`seeks to bridge the often siloed discussions between pol-
`icy makers in Washington, D.C. and technologists in Sili-
`con Valley so as to advance smart policy that encourages
`innovation. The organization regularly hosts policy pan-
`els, hackathons, and conferences convening influencers
`and technologists to address challenges facing political
`institutions and the nation.
`Engine Advocacy is a nonprofit technology policy,
`research, and advocacy organization that bridges the
`gap between policymakers and startups, working with
`government and a community of high-technology, growth-
`oriented startups across the nation to support the de-
`velopment of technology entrepreneurship. Engine con-
`ducts research, organizes events, and spearheads cam-
`paigns to educate elected officials, the entrepreneur com-
`
`

`

`3
`
`munity, and the general public on issues vital to fostering
`technological innovation.
`The Innovation Defense Foundation is a project of the
`Method Foundation, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan re-
`search and issue-advocacy institution that advocates for
`“permissionless innovation,” seeking to repeal, relax, or
`replace unnecessary regulations that stand in the way of
`innovation. Through a combination of research, advocacy,
`and regulatory filings, the IDF pushes back against risk-
`averse, regressive, and precautionary policies that both
`threaten America’s innovators and limit our society’s
`ability to cope with new and existing challenges.
`The American Antitrust Institute is an independent
`nonprofit organization devoted to promoting competition
`that protects consumers, businesses, and society.
`It
`serves the public through research, education, and ad-
`vocacy on the benefits of competition and the use of
`antitrust enforcement as a vital component of national
`and international competition policy. AAI enjoys the
`input of an Advisory Board that consists of over 130
`prominent antitrust lawyers, law professors, economists,
`and business leaders.2
`
`2Individual views of members of AAI’s Board of Directors or
`Advisory Board may differ from AAI’s positions.
`
`

`

`SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
`Laws generally do not aim to suppress competition,
`entrench monopolies, or reduce consumer choice and wel-
`fare. Yet the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, under
`a broad construction applied by the Court of Appeals,
`embraces these adverse, anticompetitive results. Firms
`can wield the broad construction, under which access to
`computer information is “unauthorized” whenever the ac-
`cessor violates a contractual or other stated term for how
`the information may be used, in multiple ways that do not
`merely injure competitors but rather impede competition
`as a whole. That this broad construction turns the CFAA
`from a computer trespass statute into a business tool
`for blocking competition shows that the construction is
`wrong.
`I. Recent uses of the CFAA reveal the many ways to
`invoke the statute to suppress competition. Dominant so-
`cial media firms have invoked the CFAA to prevent users
`from transferring their information over to competitor
`services, cementing network effects that protect those
`dominant firms from competition. Platform services,
`ones that serve as bases upon which innovative startups
`can build new products, have cut off startup products on
`their platforms to favor their own clones. And companies
`have sought to restrict price comparison tools from ac-
`cessing pricing data, limiting consumer choice and raising
`prices in the process.
`These uses of the CFAA are far from the intended
`purpose of that statute, namely to prevent abusive in-
`trusion and trespassing into computers. The information
`accessed in the aforementioned cases was public or gen-
`erally available, and the basis for invoking the CFAA
`was not illicit trespass but rather contractual terms that
`
`4
`
`

`

`5
`
`prohibit competitive uses of information. Broad construc-
`tion of the CFAA, which renders these anticompetitive
`contractual terms powerfully enforceable, thus turns the
`law into a weapon against competition.
`II.
`Intellectual property laws further demonstrate
`problems with the broad construction of the CFAA. Both
`trade secret and copyright law embody careful balances
`intended to ensure that they do not overstep on legit-
`imate competition: Trade secrets protect only nonpub-
`lic information where reasonable measures are taken
`to ensure secrecy; copyright does not protect facts and
`includes limitations such as the fair use doctrine.
`The CFAA lacks any balances commensurate with
`those intellectual property laws. As such, the broad con-
`struction of the CFAA enables firms to construct ad hoc
`trade secret protections without complying with the se-
`crecy requirements of trade secret law, and enables firms
`to invent copyright-like protections on uncopyrightable
`facts with none of the competition-preserving limitations
`of copyright law. The legislative history confirms that the
`CFAA was not intended to override intellectual property
`regimes, and the statute should not be construed to do so.
`III. While the broad construction of the CFAA pro-
`duces these anticompetitive effects, narrower construc-
`tions do not. The construction proffered by Petitioner,
`based on entitlement to access information, would pre-
`vent anticompetitive terms of use from being actionable
`under the CFAA. More specific constructions proposed
`by several amici, which would require technical access
`control measures before the CFAA could be invoked,
`would further prevent the law from being used for an-
`ticompetitive purposes, while still precluding actual in-
`stances of computer intrusion or trespass. These inter-
`
`

`

`6
`
`pretations should be adopted to prevent further misuse
`of the CFAA to hinder competition.
`To the extent that businesses wish to limit uses of
`their computer information, contract law is their vehi-
`cle for doing so; computer operators always have the
`option of bringing suit for breach of contract. But long-
`established rules of contract law balance proprietary in-
`terests and the general preference for competition; the
`CFAA’s powerful remedies exceed those balanced rules
`of contracts.
`In these ways, the broad construction of the CFAA
`exemplifies what then-Professor Easterbrook warned
`against in his 1983 work Statutes’ Domains: a statute,
`intended to deal with computer trespass, now applied to
`stymie competition and supplant contract and intellectual
`property laws.3 The statute was never meant to have
`such an expansive domain, and this Court should construe
`it narrowly to return it to its proper scope.
`
`ARGUMENT
`I. BROAD CONSTRUCTION OF THE CFAA
`ENABLES ANTICOMPETITIVE CONDUCT
`In addition to being a criminal statute, the Computer
`Fraud and Abuse Act includes extensive civil liability and
`remedies. See 18 U.S.C. § 1030(g). In view of the broad
`interpretation of the statute embraced by the Court of
`Appeals and other courts, businesses have frequently
`invoked the CFAA not to prevent computer intrusion
`or trespass but to suppress competition by “restrict[ing]
`
`3See Frank H. Easterbrook, Statutes’ Domains, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev.
`533, 544 (1983).
`
`

`

`7
`
`their competitors’ access to information they’ve pub-
`lished publicly online for the rest of the world to see.”
`Jamie L. Williams, Automation Is Not “Hacking”: Why
`Courts Must Reject Attempts to Use the CFAA as an
`Anti-Competitive Sword, 24 B.U. J. Sci. & Tech. L. 416,
`420 (2018).
`In particular, the CFAA has been used in at least
`three anticompetitive contexts:
`to stymie direct com-
`petitors, to close off platforms to new startups, and to
`interfere with tools that advance consumer choice.
`
`A.
`
`INCUMBENT COMPANIES CAN DIRECTLY
`BLOCK COMPETITORS FROM ENTERING THE
`MARKET
`Most directly, the broad reading of the CFAA en-
`ables companies, social media platforms in particular, to
`stop competitors from building competing services. A
`review of judicial opinions under that law found that
`“a tremendous number of these opinions concern claims
`brought by direct commercial competitors or companies
`in closely adjacent markets to each other.” Andrew
`Sellars, Twenty Years of Web Scraping and the Computer
`Fraud and Abuse Act, 24 B.U. J. Sci. & Tech. L. 372, 390
`(2018) (footnote omitted).
`In a striking example found in Facebook, Inc. v. Power
`Ventures, Inc., a startup social networking service called
`Power.com enabled individuals to aggregate their con-
`tent and relationships from multiple existing services
`onto a simple, unified system. See 844 F.3d 1058, 1062
`(9th Cir. 2016). To enable this aggregation, a user would
`authorize Power.com to collect information from those
`existing social media services by accessing the user’s
`account on each service. See id. at 1067. One of these
`
`

`

`8
`
`existing services, Facebook, demanded that Power.com
`cease and desist from accessing data this way, and subse-
`quently sued under the CFAA. See id. at 1063.
`While the Ninth Circuit recognized that Power.com
`had initial authorization to access Facebook data, it held
`that the cease-and-desist letter revoked any further ac-
`cess, rendering Power.com in violation of the CFAA. See
`id. at 1067. To reach that conclusion, the court applied a
`broad reading of that statute, under which a mere letter
`that “warned Power that it may have violated federal and
`state law” was sufficient to render access unauthorized.
`See id. at 1067 n.3. As a result, Facebook was able to
`leverage the CFAA to prevent a competitor from access-
`ing otherwise-available data to start a business.
`Facebook’s CFAA success against Power.com comes
`at a time of controversy over the dominance of social me-
`dia companies, including Facebook itself. Scholars often
`attribute the lack of competition in the social media mar-
`ket to lock-in caused by network effects—Facebook users
`face difficulty switching to new platforms because their
`photos, writings, and friend relationships are already
`stuck within Facebook.4 Policymakers and experts have
`thus looked to measures to increase “interoperability,”
`that is, to enable users to migrate to competing social
`networks without loss of data or key functionalities like
`
`4See, e.g., Spencer Weber Waller, Antitrust and Social Net-
`working, 90 N.C. L. Rev. 1771, 1787–88 (2012). Many social media
`companies now allow users to retrieve some of their data, but that
`retrievable fraction of data appears to be less than useful. See Gabriel
`Nicholas & Michael Weinberg, Data Portability and Platform Com-
`petition: Is User Data Exported from Facebook Actually Useful to
`Competitors? 15–17 (2019), available online. Locations of authorities
`available online are shown in the Table of Authorities.
`
`

`

`9
`
`messaging.5 There have been calls to encourage or even
`require data sharing or interoperability, to enable new
`competitor entry.6
`To be sure, “there is no consensus” as to how antitrust
`law should account for “technologically dynamic markets
`characterized by network effects.” See United States v.
`Microsoft Corp., 253 F.2d 34, 50 (D.C. Cir. 2001). Nev-
`ertheless, these important antitrust questions should not
`be preempted by an unrelated law of computer trespass.
`If potentially anticompetitive terms of service are en-
`forceable under the CFAA, as they apparently were in
`Power Ventures, then that law becomes a powerful tool
`for companies to preserve market share and suppress
`competition.
`Experience shows that companies will wield such
`competition-suppressing power to the fullest extent. See
`Cory Doctorow, Adversarial Interoperability, Electronic
`Frontier Found. (Oct. 2, 2019). For example, brand-name
`drug manufacturers have asserted safety regulations to
`withhold samples from generic competitors, thereby pre-
`venting the competitors from completing the regulatory
`process prerequisite to entering the market. See Michael
`A. Carrier, Sharing, Samples, and Generics: An An-
`titrust Framework, 103 Cornell L. Rev. 1, 9–12 (2017);
`Henry N. Butler, REMS-Restricted Drug Distribution
`Programs and the Antitrust Economics of Refusals to
`Deal with Potential General Competitors, 67 Fla. L. Rev.
`977, 979 (2016). This behavior, which courts and federal
`
`5See, e.g., Gus Rossi & Charlotte Slaiman, Interoperability =
`Privacy + Competition, Pub. Knowledge (Apr. 26, 2019).
`6See Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling
`Service Switching (ACCESS) Act of 2019, S. 2658, 116th Cong.
`sec. 4(a) (Oct. 22, 2019).
`
`

`

`10
`
`authorities have described as a “significant threat to com-
`petition,” Butler, supra, at 991 (quoting FTC assistant
`director Markus Meier), is much like Facebook’s invoca-
`tion of the CFAA against Power.com: A dominant firm
`making a resource publicly available except to competi-
`tors, and citing an unrelated safety law to justify this
`anticompetitive act.
`Use of the CFAA to hamstring direct competition
`thus illustrates how “[m]isuse of courts and governmen-
`tal agencies is a particularly effective means of delaying
`or stifling competition.” Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust
`Paradox 159 (1978). In particular, CFAA assertion is
`a form of “cheap exclusionary behavior”: It is virtually
`costless for a dominant firm to write terms of service
`invoking the CFAA to exclude competition, and the
`broad construction renders that cheap exclusionary tactic
`powerfully effective. Susan A. Creighton et al., Cheap
`Exclusion, 72 Antitrust L.J. 975, 992 (2005). It is difficult
`to imagine Congress intending a computer trespass law
`to have this sort of exclusionary effect.
`
`B. ONLINE PLATFORM OPERATORS CAN
`COPY AND THEN FORECLOSE INNOVATIVE
`STARTUPS
`The broad construction of the CFAA also impedes
`competition in a different circumstance, where a com-
`puter service operates a platform upon which other tools
`or services are built. Using the CFAA, a monopoly-
`minded platform provider can knock out innovative start-
`ups or other services on the platform, even while subsum-
`ing their businesses for the platform’s own.
`An example is found in HiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn
`Corp., which involved well-known website LinkedIn, a
`
`

`

`11
`
`platform for professionals to share their resumes and
`career information. See 938 F.3d 985, 991 (9th Cir. 2019).
`A startup firm, hiQ, used LinkedIn’s public data platform
`as a basis for analysis to provide companies with novel
`insights such as identifying career opportunities, recom-
`mending bonuses, or identifying needed training. See id.
`Initially, LinkedIn offered no analogous service to hiQ
`and in fact embraced a relationship with the company
`for several years, perhaps because hiQ’s services were
`a value-add atop LinkedIn’s platform. See id. Yet in
`May 2017, LinkedIn demanded that hiQ cease and desist
`from accessing any further LinkedIn data, threatening to
`invoke the CFAA and essentially putting an end to hiQ’s
`business. See id. at 992. Just months later, LinkedIn
`announced its own new product, Talent Insights, which
`offered data insights highly similar to hiQ’s. See id. at
`991–92 & n.7. In other words, LinkedIn positioned itself
`to absorb hiQ’s business just as LinkedIn invoked the
`CFAA to shut hiQ down.
`LinkedIn’s introducing an alternative service to hiQ
`may well have been procompetitive, but forcibly exclud-
`ing hiQ was almost certainly not.
`Indeed, the Ninth
`Circuit stated that “LinkedIn’s conduct may well not
`be ‘within the realm of fair competition.’” See id. at
`998 (quoting Inst. of Veterinary Pathology, Inc. v. Cal.
`Health Labs., Inc., 116 Cal. App. 3d 111, 127 (Ct. App.
`1981)).7 Specifically, a platform company favoring its own
`platform-using product by denying competitors access
`to the platform is a form of “input foreclosure,” which
`
`7The court ultimately relied on a separate claim for tortious
`interference and did not reach the unfair competition claim directly.
`See id. at 999 & n.11.
`
`

`

`12
`
`antitrust scholars and enforcement agencies have long
`wrestled with and often found to be problematic.8
`In Microsoft, for example, the dominant operating
`system maker took a variety of actions to inhibit use of
`a third-party web browser Netscape Navigator, relative
`to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer, including use of
`contracts to foreclose installation of Netscape on the
`operating system to an extent. See 253 F.2d at 59–64.
`The D.C. Circuit held many of those actions, including the
`contract-based foreclosure, to violate § 2 of the Sherman
`Act. See id. at 63–78. Similarly, LinkedIn foreclosed
`its data platform to hiQ, thereby favoring its own Talent
`Insights product; to the extent that LinkedIn had market
`power in its data, its acts would have fallen within the
`logic of Microsoft.
`But LinkedIn’s potentially anticompetitive actions
`would have been absolved and permissible if its cease-
`and-desist letter triggered the CFAA. See HiQ, 938 F.3d
`at 999. While the Ninth Circuit ultimately found the
`CFAA inapplicable, it did so on narrow grounds: Because
`LinkedIn’s website and thus data was “accessible to the
`general public” with no authentication system at all, the
`authorization elements of the CFAA were not invoked.
`Id. at 1003. Had LinkedIn installed even a perfunctory
`
`8See U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, Vertical Merger
`Guidelines 4–7 (June 30, 2020), available onlin

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