[TrainedMonkey]

Is this strictly legal? For example, in the scenario where a "misconfigured" bot of a large evil corporation get's taken down and, due to layers of ass covering, they think it's your fault and it cost them a lot of money. Do they have a legal case that could fly in eastern district of Texas?

[majewsky]

IANAL, and I'm German, not American, so I can't speak to the legal situation in the US.

But in Germany, the section of the copyright law concerning data mining specifically says that scraping websites is legal unless the owner of the website objects in a machine-readable form. robots.txt very clearly fulfils this standard. If any bot owner complains that you labelled them as a bot as outlined above, they would be admitting that they willfully ignored your robots.txt, and that appears to me to make them civilly liable for copyright infringement.

Source: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__44b.html

I also had a look if these actions would count as self-defense against computer espionage under the criminal code, but the relevant section only outlaws gaining access to data not intended for oneself which is "specifically protected against unauthorized access". I don't think this claim will fly for a public website.

Source: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__202a.html

[Aeolun]

I don’t think there is anything illegal about serving a large payload? If they dob’t like it they can easily stop making requests.

[philsnow]

That rocket docket is somewhat diminished after TC Heartland

https://www.bakerdonelson.com/return-of-the-rocket-docket-ne...

[wil421]

Why would this be a patent issue for the east district of Texas?

[philsnow]

Companies liked to bring patent suits there because it has historically been a very “business friendly” docket

[wil421]

Doesn’t explain why it’s an issue in the context of the thread.

[Ylpertnodi]

Texas, America?

[Propelloni]

Texas, USA.