Sharing Your Netflix Password Is Now A Criminal Act

The United States Court of Appeals for the ninth circuit ruled this week that sharing your Netflix password is now a federal crime.

According to Fusion, the decision comes as part of the United States v. David Nosal, a decade-long case in which Nosal left his job and yet continued to use the password of a person still with the firm to download employee information. While the ruling is not directly related to streaming accounts, it will be able to be exercised against them -- and that's a problem for pretty much everyone who has a lap top and a pulse.

As one Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in a dissenting opinion:

This case is about password sharing. People frequently share their passwords, notwithstanding the fact that websites and employers have policies prohibiting it. In my view, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) does not make the millions of people who engage in this ubiquitous, useful, and generally harmless conduct into unwitting federal criminals.

In short, blah, blah, blah, a bunch of legal jargon that you can read via Fusion's report or this 67-page document: sharing Netflix passwords is now a criminal act, or, as my Twitter pal Rachel Millman put it, "lol see u in jail."

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