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by ANarrativeApe 451 days ago
Excuse my ignorance, but is it time to update the open source licenses in the light of this behavior? If so, what should the evolved license wording be?

I appreciate that this could be easily circumvented by a 'bad actor', but it would make this abuse overt...
3 comments
mook 451 days ago
They already ignore copyright. The open source licenses are based on copyright, so changing the licenses wouldn't do squat, they'd still ignore it.

See also: Meta being sued for torrenting. Since this is an Ars Technica article, here's another one: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

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pabs3 450 days ago
That wouldn't be an Open Source Definition compliant license. More in this subthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43423595

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johnnyanmac 451 days ago
From my little understanding, we have a sort of agreement in place with an item called robot.txt that's more or less a hanshake with such scrapers. Of course, the issue is these scrapers are blatantly ignoring robots.txt

A license can help as well, but what's a license without enforcement? These companies are simply treating the courts as a cost to do business.

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CaptainFever 451 days ago
Close, robots.txt was originally for web crawlers, to reduce accidental denial-of-service attacks. It had nothing to do with the scraping (i.e. downloading content and parsing the HTML tags in a programmatic manner).
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WesolyKubeczek 450 days ago
What do you think a search engine’s crawler bot is doing exactly? I could sure be wrong, but I have a hunch that “downloading content and paraing the HTML tags in a programmatic manner” describes it.
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CaptainFever 450 days ago
Yes, but the difference is that the term "scraping" also targets things like automatically generating RSS feeds from HTML pages, which is not covered by robots.txt.
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WesolyKubeczek 450 days ago
I thought robots.txt covered all automated, programmatic access by third parties where a bot slurps stuff and follows links, without splitting hairs about it.

But what do I know, the young whippersnappers will just word lawyer me to death, so I better shut up and go away.

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