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Comment by post-it | Hacker News Reader

Beeper hasn't necessarily agreed to Apple's ToS.

CFAA would be unenforceable if it required unauthorized users to have agreed to the terms of service of the systems they were abusing. You’re not supposed to be there and that’s sufficient.

Doesn't matter, plenty of legal precedent for Apple to fall back on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_v._Zehmer

Very cut and dry CFAA case, I'm guessing Beeper saw how well it went for Epic Games when they leveraged the useful idiots to sway public opinion, so they are doing the same for a quick buck and hoping it gets political enough to avoid getting fined.

Ah yes, they should absolutely go with these types of sovereign citizen legal arguments.

All its users have, as Beeper is aware, and Beeper has taken extensive steps, predicated on the existing of that customer agreement (in fact: meaningful only because of that agreement) to help them renege.

Beeper isn't marketed at Apple users - they already have access to iMessage. Are we to presume that all Android users have agreed to the iOS ToS?

If we’re presuming that the end-user has not agreed to any term of service, then why are we assuming that they have the right to use the service in anyway whatsoever? It’s basically the definition of unauthorized use at that point.

Maybe I have an Apple laptop but an Android phone and would like to use a unified messaging solution across both.

But we shouldn't have to get to such specific examples to discuss the issue at play here—Apple is fighting against adversarial interoperability. I'm amazed to see people arguing in their favor on Hacker News.

In this case I wasn’t arguing in their favor but arguing that the lack of agreement to a TOS does not somehow imply authorization.

> Beeper isn't marketed at Apple users

Does that mean they are therefore not competing with Apple? And if their users are using Beeper Mini to access iMessage, are they not implicitly accepting the ToS?

> are they not implicitly accepting the ToS?

Courts generally do not find that ToS can be accepted implicitly, even in situations where they are actually shown to the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browsewrap#Case_law

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