In what sounds like a James Bond spy caper, an MPAA executive allegedly paid a hacker $15,000 to break into a server and snatch copies of emails. The hacker accomplished the dirty deed and emailed the MPAA dozens of pages of material—ostensibly for use by the MPAA in its copyright infringement action against a company whose servers were involved in file sharing. The MPAA released a statement that “The information was obtained in a legal manner from a confidential informant who we believe obtained the information legally.”
Now a federal appeals court in California is determining if a lower court ruling should re-define online privacy protection by interpreting “intercept” under the 1968 Wiretap Act. The case, Bunnel v. Motion Picture Association of America, revolves around a ruling a year ago that held the hacker didn’t really “intercept” emails because they were in storage—not technically in transit. The lower court ruled the hacker’s “…actions did not halt the transmission of the messages to their intended recipients. As such, under well-settled case law, as well as a reading of the statute and the ordinary meaning of the word ‘intercept,’ Anderson’s acquisitions of the e-mails did not violate the Wiretap Act.” In other words, “grab copies of emails sitting on your server for a nanosecond” and it’s not wiretapping. Stay tuned!