The days of sharing your Netflix and/or HBO Go account information may soon be over.Or is it? In a recent ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, a three-judge panel found that sharing passwords without authorization of the account holder is a crime and can be prosecuted under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. According to an article in Fortune, Judge Stephen Reinhardt stated, “The majority is wrong to conclude that a person necessarily accesses a computer account ‘without authorization’ if he does so without permission of the system owner.” He made sense of the ruling by using examples like logging in to a Facebook account on behalf of a friend or relative. The ruling, however, doesn’t seem to phase the VOD companies at all. In fact, during the recent 2016 International CES convention, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that the trend of people using another person’s account infomation hasn’t been a huge problem at all. “We love people sharing Netflix whether they’re two people on a couch or 10 people on a couch.” Netflix’s own terms of use specify that the primary account holder have “exclusive control” of the account and shouldn’t reveal their password to anyone. But, on the other hand, Netflix does allow subscribers to assign up to five different profiles in order for family/household internal sharing.
