[hsbauauvhabzb]

How else do you tell the bot you do not wish to be scraped? Your analogy is lacking - you didn’t order a package, you never wanted a package, and the postman is taking something, not leaving it, and you’ve explicitly left a sign saying ‘you are not welcome here’.

[Calavar]

If you are serving web pages, you are soliciting GET requests, kind of like ordering a package is soliciting a delivery.

"Taking" versus "giving" is neither here nor there for this discussion. The question is are you expressing a preference on etiquette versus a hard rule that must be followed. I personally believe robots.txt is the former, and I say that as someone who serves more pages than they scrape

[yuliyp]

Having a front door physically allows anyone on the street to come to knock on it. Having a "no soliciting" sign is an instruction clarifying that not everybody is welcome. Having a web site should operate in a similar fashion. The robots.txt is the equivalent of such a sign.

[halJordan]

No soliciting signs are polite requests that no one has to follow, and door to door salesman regularly walk right past them.

No one is calling for the criminalization of door-to-door sales and no one is worried about how much door-to-door sales increases water consumption.

[ahtihn]

If a company was sending hundreds of salesmen to knock at a door one after the other, I'm pretty sure they could successfully get sued for harassment.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Can’t Americans literally shoot each other for trespassing?

[dragonwriter]

Generally, legally, no, not just for ignoring a “no soliciting” sign.

[oytis]

> door to door salesman regularly walk right past them.

Oh, now I understand why Americans can't see a problem here.

[duskdozer]

>No one is calling for the criminalization of door-to-door sales

Ok, I am, right now.

It seems like there are two sides here that are talking past one another: "people will do X and you accept it if you do not actively prevent it, if you can" and "X is bad behavior that should be stopped and shouldn't be the burden of individuals to stop". As someone who leans to the latter, the former just sounds like restating the problem being complained about.

[distances]

> No one is calling for the criminalization of door-to-door sales

Door-to-door sales absolutely are banned in many jurisdictions.

[czscout]

And a no soliciting sign is no more cosmically binding than robots.txt. It's a request, not an enforceable command.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Tell me you work in an ethically bankrupt industry without telling me you work in an ethically bankrupt industry.

[andoando]

Well yes this is exactly what's happening as of now. But there SHOULD be a way to upload content without giving it access to scrapers.

[munk-a]

I disagree strongly here - though not from a technical perspective. There's absolutely a legal concept of making your work available for viewing without making it available for copying and AI scraping (while we can technically phrase it as just viewing a bunch of times) is effectively copying.

Lets say a large art hosting site realizes how damaging AI training on their data can be - should they respond by adding a paywall before any of their data is visible? If that paywall is added (let's just say $5/mo) can most of the artists currently on their site afford to stay there? Can they afford it if their potential future patrons are limited to just those folks who can pay $5/mo? Would the scraper be able to afford a one time cost of $5 to scrape all of that data?

I think, as much they are a deeply flawed concept, this is a case where EULAs or an assumption of no-access for training unless explicitly granted that's actually enforced through the legal system is required. There are a lot of small businesses and side projects that are dying because of these models and I think that creative outlet has societal value we would benefit from preserving.

[jMyles]

> There's absolutely a legal concept of making your work available for viewing without making it available for copying

This "legal concept" is enforceable through legacy systems of police and violence. The internet does not recognize it. How much more obvious can this get?

If we stumble down the path of attempting to apply this legal framework, won't some jurisdiction arise with no IP protections whatsoever and just come to completely dominate the entire economy of the internet?

If I can spin up a server in copyleftistan with a complete copy of every album and film ever made, available for free download, why would users in copyrightistan use the locked down services of their domestic economy?

[kelnos]

> legacy systems of police and violence

You use "legacy" as if these systems are obsolete and on their way out. They're not. They're here to stay, and will remain dominant, for better or worse. Calling them "legacy" feels a bit childish, as if you're trying to ignore reality and base arguments on your preferred vision of how things should be.

> The internet does not recognize it.

Sure it does. Not universally, but there are a lot of things governments and law enforcement can do to control what people see and do on the internet.

> If we stumble down the path of attempting to apply this legal framework, won't some jurisdiction arise with no IP protections whatsoever and just come to completely dominate the entire economy of the internet?

No, of course not, that's silly. That only really works on the margins. Any other country would immediately slap economic sanctions on that free-for-all jurisdiction and cripple them. If that fails, there's always a military response they can resort to.

> If I can spin up a server in copyleftistan with a complete copy of every album and film ever made, available for free download, why would users in copyrightistan use the locked down services of their domestic economy?

Because the governments of all the copyrightistans will block all traffic going in and out of copyleftistan. While this may not stop determined, technically-adept people, it will work for the most part. As I said, this sort of thing only really works on the margins.

[jMyles]

I guess I'm more optimistic about the future of the human condition.

> You use "legacy" as if these systems are obsolete and on their way out. They're not.

I have serious doubts that nation states will still exist in 500 years. I feel quite certain that they'll be gone in 10,000. And I think it's generally good to build an internet for those time scales.

> base arguments on your preferred vision of how things should be.

I hope we all build toward our moral compass; I don't mean for arguments to fall into fallacies on this basis, but yeah I think our internet needs to resilient against the waxing and waning of the affairs of state. I don't know if that's childish... Maybe we need to have a more child-like view of things? The internet _is_ a child in the sense of its maturation timeframe.

> there are a lot of things governments and law enforcement can do to control what people see and do on the internet.

Of course there are things that governments do. But are they effective? I just returned from a throatsinging retreat in Tuva - a fairly remote part of Siberia. The Russian government has apparently quietly begun to censor quite a few resources on the internet, and it has caused difficulty in accessing the traditional music of the Tuvan people. And I was very happily astonished to find that everybody to whom I ran into, including a shaman grandmother, was fairly adept at routing around this censorship using a VPN and/or SSH tunnel.

I think the internet is doing a wonderful job at routing around censorship - better than any innovation ever discovered by humans so far.

> Any other country would immediately slap economic sanctions on that free-for-all jurisdiction and cripple them. If that fails, there's always a military response they can resort to.

Again, maybe I'm just more optimistic, but I think that on longer time frames, the sober elder statesmen/women will prevail and realize that violence is not an appropriate response to bytes transiting the wire that they wish weren't.

And at the end of the day, I don't think governments even have the power here - the content creators do. I distribute my music via free channels because that's the easiest way to reach my audience, and because, given the high availability of compelling free content, there's just no way I can make enough money on publishing to even concern myself with silly restrictions.

It seems to me that I'm ahead of the curve in this area, not behind it. But I'm certainly open to being convinced otherwise.

[dns_snek]

> Again, maybe I'm just more optimistic, but I think that on longer time frames, the sober elder statesmen/women will prevail and realize that violence is not an appropriate response to bytes transiting the wire that they wish weren't.

Your framing is off because this notion of fairness or morality isn't something they concern themselves with. They're using violence because if they didn't, they would be allowing other entities to gain wealth and power at their expense. I don't think it's much more complex than that.

See how differently these same bytes are treated in the hands of Aaron Swartz vs OpenAI. One threatened to empower humanity at the expense of reducing profits for a few rich men, so he got crucified for it. The other is hoping to make humans redundant, concentrate the distribution of wealth even further, and strengthen the US world dominance, so all of the right wheels get greased for them and they get a license to kill - figuratively and literally.

[davesque]

If I order a package from a company selling a good, am I inviting all that company's competitors to show up at my doorstep to try and outbid the delivery person from the original company when they arrive, and maybe they all show up at the same time and cause my porch to collapse? No, because my front porch is a limited resource for which I paid for an intended purpose. Is it illegal for those other people to show up? Maybe not by the letter of the law.

[kelnos]

> If you are serving web pages, you are soliciting GET requests

So what's the solution? How do I host a website that welcomes human visitors, but rejects all scrapers?

There is no mechanism! The best I can do is a cat-and-mouse arms race where I try to detect the traffic I don't want, and block it, while the people generating the traffic keep getting more sophisticated about hiding from my detection.

No, putting up a paywall is not a reasonable response to this.

> The question is are you expressing a preference on etiquette versus a hard rule that must be followed.

Well, there really aren't any hard rules that must be followed, because there are no enforcement mechanisms outside of going nuclear (requiring login). Everything is etiquette. And I agree that robots.txt is also etiquette, and it is super messed up that we tolerate "AI" companies stomping all over that etiquette.

Do we maybe want laws that say everyone must respect robots.txt? Maybe? But then people will just move their scrapers to a jurisdiction without those laws. And I'm sure someone could make the argument that robots.txt doesn't apply to them because they spoofed a browser user-agent (or another user-agent that a site explicitly allows). So perhaps we have a new mechanism, or new laws, or new... something.

But this all just highlights the point I'm making here: there is no reasonable mechanism (no, login pages and http auth don't count) for site owners to restrict access to their site based on these sorts of criteria. And that's a problem.

[pluto_modadic]

ignoring a rate limit gets you blocked.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Scrapers actively bypass this by rotating IP addresses.

[stray]

You require something the bot won't have that a human would.

Anybody may watch the demo screen of an arcade game for free, but you have to insert a quarter to play — and you can have even greater access with a key.

> and you’ve explicitly left a sign saying ‘you are not welcome here’

And the sign said "Long-haired freaky people Need not apply" So I tucked my hair up under my hat And I went in to ask him why He said, "You look like a fine upstandin' young man I think you'll do" So I took off my hat and said, "Imagine that Huh, me workin' for you"

[michaelt]

> You require something the bot won't have that a human would.

Is this why the “open web” is showing me a captcha or two, along with their cookie banner and newsletter pop up these days?

[bigbuppo]

Up until people started making a big stink about CAPTCHAs being used for unpaid labor at scale, uh, well they had two purposes.

[davsti4]

Its simple, and I'll quote myself - "robots.txt isn't the law".

[ColinWright]

Quoting Cervisia :

> robots.txt. This is not the law

In Germany, it is the law. § 44b UrhG says (translated):

(1) Text and data mining is the automated analysis of one or more digital or digitized works to obtain information, in particular about patterns, trends, and correlations.

(2) Reproductions of lawfully accessible works for text and data mining are permitted. These reproductions must be deleted when they are no longer needed for text and data mining.

(3) Uses pursuant to paragraph 2, sentence 1, are only permitted if the rights holder has not reserved these rights. A reservation of rights for works accessible online is only effective if it is in machine-readable form.

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45776825

[davsti4]

Its the law pertaining to copyright. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur... ... and that's only in Germany.

If what you're protecting with robots.txt isn't copyright-able, then you'll need to find another legal means.

[bigbuppo]

Violating norms makes you an abusive jerk at best.

[davsti4]

That's a slippery slope opinion.

One person's norm can oppose another's norm. Who defines them? If my "norm" is to stop at a stop sign, and yours is to roll through it, are you the abusive jerk?

[bigbuppo]

No means no. Only yes means yes. Stop means stop. Why are people in tech so confused about this? Agree, or ask again in three days.

[smsm42]

"I will do anything that will not literally get me into jail" is a pretty low bar. Most decent people try to do better than that - and that's the only reason society still exists, because there's not enough cops to put all bad people into jail and never will be.

[davsti4]

Exactly - its why laws are written. So, if its enough of a problem, then there should be a law stopping/regulating it.

Are published TOSs enough to stop the owners of the bots?

[smsm42]

TOS wouldn't be enough but laws wouldn't be enough either. We have thousands of pages of laws, and people violate them all the times, and very often with zero consequences.

[nkrisc]

Put your content behind authentication if you don’t want it to be requested by just anyone.

[kelnos]

But I do want my content accessible to "just anyone", as long as they are humans. I don't want it accessible to bots.

You are free to say "well, there is no mechanism to do that", and I would agree with you. That's the problem!

[9rx]

> as long as they are humans. I don't want it accessible to bots.

A curious position. There isn't a secondary species using the internet. There is only humans. Unless you foresee some kind of alien invasion or earthworm uprising, nothing other than humans will ever access your content. Rejecting the tools humans use to bridge their biological gaps is rather nonsensical.

> You are free to say "well, there is no mechanism to do that", and I would agree with you. That's the problem!

I suppose it would be pretty neat if humans were born with some kind of internet-like telepathy ability, but lacking that mechanism isn't any kind of real problem. Humans are well adept at using tools and have successfully used tools for millennia. The internet itself is a tool! Which, like before, makes rejecting the human use of tools nonsensical.

[nkrisc]

Even abusive crawlers and scrapers are acting as agents of real humans, just as your browser is acting as your agent. I don't even know how you could reliably draw a reasonable line in the sand between the two without putting some group of people on the wrong side of the line.

I suppose the ultimate solution would be browsers and operating systems and hardware manufacturers co-operating to implement some system that somehow cryptographically signs HTTP requests which attests that it was triggered by an actual, physical interaction with a computing device by a human.

Though you don't have to think for very long to come up with all kinds of collateral damage that would cause and how bad actors could circumvent it anyway.

All in all, this whole issue seems more like a legal problem than a technical one.

[bigbuppo]

Or the AI people could just stop being abusive jerks. That's an even easier solution.

[9rx]

While that is probably good advice in general, the earlier commenter wanted even the abusive jerks to have access to his content.

He just doesn't want tools humans use to access content to be used in association with his content.

What he failed to realize is that if you eliminate the tools, the human cannot access the content anyway. They don't have the proper biological interfaces. Had he realized that, he'd have come to notice that simply turning off his server fully satisfies the constraints.

[nkrisc]

That would be easier. Too bad it won't ever happen.

[1gn15]

What the hell? That is incredibly discriminatory. Fuck off. I support those that counter those discriminatory mechanisms.

[Anamon]

Discriminatory against bots? That doesn't even make any sense.

[bigbuppo]

They probably have stock options.

[bakql]

Stop your http server if you do not wish to receive http requests.

[vkou]

Turn off your phone if you don't want to receive robo-dialed calls and unsolicited texts 300 times a day.

Fence off your yard if you don't want people coming by and dumping a mountain of garbage on it every day.

You can certainly choose to live in a society that thinks these are acceptable solutions. I think it's bullshit, and we'd all be better off if anyone doing these things would be breaking rocks with their teeth in a re-education camp, until they learn how to be a decent human being.

[bigbuppo]

Ah yes, and unplug the mail server to stop all spam. Great idea!