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by yladiz 387 days ago
> I understand people have valid cases why they don't want their content scraped. Maybe they want to sell it - I can understand that, although I don't like it.

To be frank: it’s not your content, it’s theirs, and it doesn’t matter if you like it or not, they can decide what they want to do with it, you’re not entitled to it. Yes there are some cases that you personally have permission to scrape, or the license explicitly permits it, but this isn’t the norm.

The bigger issue isn’t that people don’t want their content to be read it’s that they want it to be read and consumed by a human in most cases, and they want their server resources (network bandwidth, CPU, etc) to be used in a manageable way. If these bots were written to be respectful, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. These bots poisoned the well, and they affect respectful bots because of their actions.