Tennessee Personal and Commercial Computer Act, implicit consent for anonymous access

The Tennessee Personal and Commercial Computer Act of 2003 makes it an offense to intentionally and without authorization access a computer, computer system, or network.

Critically, the statute states that operating a computer network in such a way as to allow anonymous access to that network constitutes implicit consent to access under this part, a materially more scraping-favorable statutory answer than the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)'s contested authorization standard: a public, unauthenticated website that does not gate access is, by the statute's own terms, one the operator has impliedly consented to anonymous access to.

Verified against the statutory text via FindLaw after Justia returned a Cloudflare CAPTCHA (a stop per protocol, not solved or bypassed) and Tennessee's own tn.gov code mirror returned 0 characters.

This document's citation and quote are narrowed to section 39-14-602 itself, the section actually read; the Act's other codified sections (39-14-601, 603 to 606, covering definitions, other offenses, and remedies) were not independently reviewed in this research and no claim is made about their content.

No Tennessee appellate decision applies this clause to a scraping or automated-collection fact pattern specifically, so treat the favorable reading as the statute's plain text rather than a litigated holding. No Tennessee-specific statute or case addresses ToS enforceability; ordinary contract law governs.