Dive Brief:

• An appeals court has upheld the conviction of a man who accessed his ex-employer's computer system by getting a former colleague to share a password with him.
• The conviction of David Nasal for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was upheld by a 2-1 vote of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims the conviction raises questions about whether a spouse could be convicted for using the password of his or her partner on a personal account. That contention, and others like it, "miss the mark," a judge in the case wrote.

Dive Insight:

There is nothing like a case like this to bring out strong viewpoints. On one hand, Nosal used the access to obtain information about potential recruits at his former company -- which he then used to help recruit them to a rival firm he was setting up. One the other, the EFF and the dissenting judge in the case warned about what they see as the potential consequences of this law.

"The majority does not provide, nor do I see, a workable line which separates the consensual password sharing in this case from the consensual password sharing of millions of legitimate account holders, which may also be contrary to the policies of system owners," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote. "There simply is no limiting principle in the majority's world of lawful and unlawful password sharing."