Giving a friend your Netflix password to watch the newest season of “Orange Is the New Black” may seem innocent, but it’s now technically a federal crime.
An opinion issued by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Court found that sharing passwords is a crime prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). As Fortune puts it, this makes millions of people who share passwords for services like Netflix and HBOGo “unwitting federal criminals.”
The decision came in the case of David Nosal, an employee at the executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. After leaving Korn/Ferry, Nosal continued to use the company’s candidate database with the login credentials of his former assistant to help launch his own search firm.
He was eventually charged with conspiracy, theft of trade secrets and three counts under CFAA and sentenced to prison time, probation, and nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines, Forbes reports.
Despite the opinion in the case, one of the Ninth Circuit judges expressed concern that “consensual password sharing” is now a prosecutable offense.
“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,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in his argument.
Reinhard said the new decision “loses sight of the anti-hacking purpose of the CFAA, and . . . threatens to criminalize all sorts of innocuous conduct engaged in daily by ordinary citizens.”
While Netflix and HBO have not commented on this ruling, here is what they had to say in the past about account sharing:
Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings told reporters at CES earlier this year that people who piggyback on a user’s account often go on to become paying members themselves, according to Tech Crunch.
“We love people sharing Netflix whether they’re two people on a couch or 10 people on a couch. That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing,” Hastings told reporters. He went on to say, “As kids move on in their life, they like to have control of their life, and as they have an income, we see them separately subscribe. It really hasn’t been a problem.”
HBO Chief Executive Richard Plepler told BuzzFeed in 2014 that password sharing wasn’t a problem and helped expose the brand. Let’s not forget Andy Samberg giving out the username and password to a working HBO Now account during the 2015 Emmys broadcast, which HBO gave the go-ahead for.
“It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, but it has no real effect on the business,” Plepler said during the BuzzFeed event.
