Comment by Jedi72

I watched a documentary on Scientology ages ago about how they were suing the crap out of people for DDoSing their site. The problem was these people were basically just kids, most were ~14 years old, who saw something on 4chan and followed instructions. I believe this was ~2001 [correction: 2008]. One of their lawyers was going with the defence that DDoS was equivalent to a sit-in protest, not unlike those used during the segregation protests in the US in the 1960s, specifically of diners who refused black customers. Sending 200 people into a diner and refusing to move is basically IRL denial of service. Unfortunately I can't remember the exact name of the documentary but this wiki page covers the events https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology. I always wondered how successful that defence was, I havent been able to find a follow-up.