Mozilla has joined EFF, the Alliance for Responsible Data Collection, Digital Medusa, and EleutherAI in filing an amicus brief in Amazon v. Perplexity, urging the Ninth Circuit not to stretch the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) far beyond its intended purpose.
We have said this before, and it remains true: laws designed to protect the security of the internet should not be used to undermine how people want to use it.
Our mission is grounded in the idea that the internet must remain open and accessible to all, and that privacy and security online are fundamental. Mozilla joined this brief because overly broad interpretations of computer crime laws can put those values at risk.
The CFAA is an anti-hacking law. It was meant to address break-ins to computer systems — not to criminalize tools that enable people to access and engage with information that is publicly available on the web. While there are no-doubt many challenging legal and policy questions around the growth and use of agentic AI tools, we believe expanding the reach of CFAA to address these issues would threaten innovation, chill the development of useful tools and services for researchers and journalists, and undermine competition online.