Do 2 Wrongs (and one bad CAPTCHA) Make a “Not Wrong”?
In a blog post by Pollstar, an interesting legal conjecture was made based upon the indictment of the Wiseguys who hacked reCAPTCHA’s CAPTCHA (see earlier news coverage). Namely, that there wasn’t really a crime committed so much as an exploitation of technology to gain a business advantage. I.e., Wiseguys merely used technology to rapidly answer Ticketmaster’s (easy-to-crack) CAPTCHAs to buy up tickets. In other words, Wiseguys followed the rules (”answer a CAPTCHA to buy a ticket”). Thus, say the pundits, there was no crime.
The real problem is the motive for such actions: acquiring an inventory of limited quantities (concert tickets) for resale on a gray market (i.e. Wiseguy’s ticket site) at a significant mark-up. The motive (suspicious pundits also say) for the indictment: Ticketmaster has undue competition for its subsidiary (TicketsNow). The end: Ticketmaster rids itself of a competitor. The corollary: consumers still end up paying too much for their tickets.
That’s a lot of ‘wrongs’ — are we really getting the ‘right’ out of this?