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by vasco 530 days ago
If I have a "no publicity" sign in my mailbox and you dump 500 lbs of flyers and magazines by my door every week for a month and cause me to lose money dealing with all the trash, I think I'd have a reasonable ground to sue even if there's no contract saying you need to respect my wish.

End of the day the claim is someone's action caused someone else undue financial burden in an way that is not easily prevented beforehand, so I wouldn't say it's a 100% clear case but I'm also not sure a judge wouldn't entertain it.
1 comments
krapp 530 days ago
I don't think you can sue over what amounts to an implied gentleman's agreement that one side never even agreed to and win but if you do, let us know.
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boredatoms 530 days ago
You can sue whenever anyone harms you
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dredmorbius 530 days ago
You can sue whenever.

The suit itself is the mechanism for determining whether the harm existed.

And yes, of course, this presents much opportunity for abuse.

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krapp 530 days ago
I didn't say no one could sue, anyone can sue anyone for anything if they have the time and the money. I said I didn't think someone could sue over non-compliance with robots.txt and win.

If it were possible, someone would have done it by now. It hasn't happened because robots.txt has absolutely no legal weight whatsoever. It's entirely voluntary, which means it's perfectly legal not to volunteer.

But if you or anyone else wants to waste their time tilting at legal windmills, have fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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vasco 530 days ago
You don't even need to mention robots.txt, there's plenty of people that have been sued for crawling and had to stop it and pay damages, just lookup "crawling lawsuits".
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macintux 530 days ago
Your verbs, “sue” and “win”, are separated by ~16 words of flowery language. It’s not surprising that people gave up partway through and reacted to just the first verb.
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echoangle 530 days ago
The „well everyone can sue anyone for anything“ is a non-serious gotcha answer anyways. If someone asks „can I sue XY because of YZ“, the always mean „and have a chance of winning“. Just suing someone without any chance of winning isn’t very interesting.
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krapp 530 days ago
"flowery language?" It's just a regular sentence with regular words in it.
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