Letter to My Sister

Hey Little Sister,

I was able to do some research on those questions you asked me. Here is what I found out. The good news is it is possible for your idea to become a reality, you just have to make sure you are within the confines of the law and have a clear understanding of what you can and can't do.

As far as what Bidders Edge did as opposed to eBay, Bidders Edge used a server to scour the eBay website to find items for Bidders Edge customers to help them get the best deal. The constant grab for information caused the eBay site to run slower thus leading to unhappy eBay users which in the long run could have caused them to switch to other sites losing them business. Essentially eBay was like a garden hose and when Bidders Edge linked up it was like putting holes in the hose that send water (information) in all different directions and the main stream to have less pressure and was slowed down. So while Bidders Edge may have felt they were potentially helping by sending business to eBay, they were in the long run hurting them. Like I said, this mattered to eBay because of the potential loss of business due to the slowed servers.

Keep in mind as well that traditional trespass to personal property is "when one person injures another person's personal property or interferes with that persons enjoyment of his or her personal property" (Cheeseman, 2009) Thanks to the growth rate of internet use and the growth of technology, the state of California simply expanded this definition to include the internet and cyber activities. According to the California Penal Code 502, the following actions were determined to be crimes: damaging, destroying or changing data to defraud or deceive people; taking or coping data form a computer network, using computer servers without permission; changing deleting or destroying data on a computer network, accessing or helping to access a computer network without permission; introducing viruses into a computer network and using the internet domain name of someone else to send viruses to cause damage to a computer network." (Magloff, 2010) When Bidders Edge linked onto eBay without first obtaining permission