Cengage Advantage Books: Fundamentals of Business Law 9th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

Exercise 6

Student Plagiarism and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is primarily a criminal statute in that its main purpose is to deter computer hackers. Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, private parties may bring a civil suit alleging a violation of the act. One case arose when four high school students were required to submit written assignments to an online anti-plagiarism service, which then archived the students' work.
Fighting Student Plagiarism
Instructors in high schools, colleges, and universities worldwide face a plagiarism problem of epic proportions. Any student can access various online sources from which work can be plagiarized. As a result, several companies, including iParadigms, LLC, have created software and other services to help instructors detect plagiarism. One of iParadigms' products is Turnitin Plagiarism Detection Service. Instructors can require their students to submit written assignments to Turnitin, which then compares the students' work with more than 10 billion Web pages; 70 million student papers; 10,000 newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals; plus thousands of books. Students who submit their work to Turnitin must agree to allow iParadigms to archive their papers in the Turnitin master file.
Does Gaining Unauthorized Access to an Online Service Violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
Four high school students who were required to submit their assignments to Turnitin filed a suit in a federal district court, claiming that the archiving of their papers infringed their copyright interests. The court found that the archiving of the papers qualified as a "fair use" and thus did not infringe the students' copyright interests (see Chapter 5 for a full discussion of copyright law). Hence, the court granted summary judgment for iParadigms, LLC, a decision that was upheld on appeal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Meanwhile, iParadigms had counterclaimed, alleging that one of the high school students had gained unauthorized access to the company's online services in violation of the CFAA. Using a password and login ID obtained via the Internet, the student had registered and submitted papers to Turnitin, misrepresenting himself as a student of a university that he had never attended.
Was this a violation of the CFAA? The federal district court did not believe so. On appeal, though, the decision was reversed and remanded. The appellate court observed that iParadigms had to spend costly resources to determine whether there was a glitch in its online registration program. These expenses fell under the economic damages part of the act, which defines loss as:
any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring... the system... to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption to service.
The federal appeals court also ruled in iParadigms' favor on a separate counterclaim, finding that the defendant had violated the Virginia Computer Crimes Act. The consequential damages presented by iParadigms fit within the "any damages" language of the Virginia law.
FOR CRITICAL ANALYSIS
What might have motivated the four high school students to bring their lawsuit?