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by sangnoir 4006 days ago
> there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways.

Are you sure about that? So you don't want any legal recourse for someone that overloads your API/web servers with thousands of requests per second? You might say a technical solution (like rate limiting) would do - but that will cost you time & money with no upside, and can be easily circumvented (use many clients in parallel with the same effect - hammering your server and increasing your costs)

I think a law for that is fine, as a last resort. It will keep people at their best behaviour.
1 comments
Dylan16807 4005 days ago
A rule against hammering a server is not at all the same as a rule against accessing the server at all.
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sangnoir 4004 days ago
We likely are in agreement - isn't a rule against hammering a server 'a legal limit on the kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system'? I was disagreeing with parent who said:

> there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways.

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Dylan16807 4004 days ago
The difference between "limit on that kind of behavior" and "limit on the kind of behavior" is critical.

A limit on red cars is a limit on "the color" of cars, but it's not a limit on "that color" when someone is pointing at a blue car.

So when "that kind" refers to sanely-implemented scraping, then there should not be a limit. There is a limit on "the kind", to restrict it to activities like scraping that aren't inherently harmful.

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sangnoir 4000 days ago
Unfortunately english isn't very precise: it's difficult to parse what MichaelGG was referring to by 'that'. I assumed he was referring to scraping (his previous sentence), but it's also possible he was referring to the CL case.

For the record, I maintain my belief that there should be a law that applies to scraping of publicly available sites.

> You wanna sue a business for scraping your site? Hey, fine, that's a civil business issue. (And really, there shouldn't be legal limits on that kind of behaviour to a publicly accessible system anyways

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