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Can Moving Data be a Crime?
Let's say you have a company with a lot of information. You hired a subcontractor to do something, let's say check for dirty data. The contractor does his work, but meanwhile he's also downloading ALL of the data on your computers. Was this theft?
The rest of the story is that he tried to sell your client list as a spam database, used the extra info as a way to pump up his corporate value, and then claimed evil employees were the fault.
Reprehensible, sure. It obviously, if true, means these guys are the worst kind of schmucks. But setting aside the particulars in this case, isn't it easy to imagine similar actions doing no harm at all?
Let's say you're running some kind of code or program on a client database from a remote site. It's an online system, and the client is sensitive (as they should be) to your mucking around with their application performance. I know if I ran into some kind of problem, issue, or something that didn't look right, I would investigate further, as part of my feduciary reponsibilities to my client. And "investigating further" probrably means downloading lots of data on a fishing expeditiion to figure out what is going on.
My point is that I don't believe moving a bunch bits around can be a crime -- although I readily acknowledge it is defined as such by current law. In the larger scheme of things, such a definition is not going to be enforcable. Worse still, if it is enforcable it is going to hurt a lot of people who meant no harm, did no harm, and just were doing their jobs.
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