• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 28, 2017

Power Ventures, a defunct aggregation service, wants to take its long-running battle with Facebook to the Supreme Court.

The dispute, which dates to 2008, centers on whether Power violated a federal anti-hacking law by "scraping" Facebook's site in order to help users transport their social media information to a new service.

Power aggregated data from different social networking sites, enabling people with accounts through MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services to access all of their information from one portal. To accomplish this, Power asked users to provide log-in information for their social networking sites and then imported people's information.

In late 2008, Facebook sent a letter to Power demanding that it cease and desist accessing the site. Power allegedly continued to draw on the passwords that users had provided in order to access their information.

Facebook contended in court that Power's refusal to honor the cease-and-desist request amounted to a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- a federal law that makes it illegal to access a computer without authorization.

Power and its supporters, including an array of digital rights groups, countered that the company didn't violate the anti-hacking law, because users voluntarily provided their log-in credentials.

Last year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Facebook on that issue. The judges wrote: "The record shows unequivocally that Power knew that it no longer had authorization to access Facebook’s computers, but continued to do so anyway."

Power now wants the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling. "Facebook and other data controllers already have outsized influence over individual users as gatekeepers," Power says in a petition seeking review by the Supreme Court.

The company adds that decisions like the one issued by the 9th Circuit "will aggrandize their power even more by handing them veto power over online entrepreneurs like petitioners who seek to enable data portability for users."