All I can say is f*ck that. It's a free and open internet. If you put content up on a public site, anyone has the right to go and look at it. Stop complaining when someone saves it.
And sure some people complain that scrapers slow down their site and that's why they use robots.txt, but really? Really? It's 2017 and your site is affected by that. I think you have bigger things to worry about.
That someone wants to use a robot to completely scrape an entire dynamic website is their goal. A site is not responsible to make that possible. One bot causes _way_ more traffic and CPU usage than just a normal visitor or 1000s of visitors.
Saying '2017' or anything else: meh.
Various network operators are pretty helpful. Sending abuse complaints regarding misbehaving bots has resulted in actions before. I've seen action being taken from universities, ISPs, etc. Though normally the bots are auto-blocked (on IP address or ranges; quite easy to script).
robots.txt is an established / de facto standard. Ignore it, be prepared to explain why. IMO pretty much any country have computer hacking laws which are vague enough that to consciously ignore such a standard can be seen as "invading".
A "not my problem" approach: I think you should really think a little bit more.
Also thanks for spreading bad information.
You're not wrong about robots.txt, you're wrong in a much more broad way. There is in fact an extremely dangerous law that could easily ensnare what you're talking about:
I don't thing that browsing a web page and saving it's content it's the same than scamming people by doing fake online site. This is growing in our country and the local police don't have any rights.
If it's a global problem we need to have global rules, we can't have Chinese not respecting Authors' rights and in the other hand only blame local people it's stupid.
Specially when it's non-tech people that do the rules, they don't know tech therefore should not say anything about it.
EDIT: You can be mad at me and down vote, but what I say is true and relevant. There's not only US in the world, specially when there's other way than protecting your site behind a robots.txt
Obviously some countries have a more lax enforcement than others, but don't be surprised if the US starts squeezing and one day you suddenly get a knock on the door.
Using simple conditional tests in haproxy, I stop most of the bots from crawling anything more than my root page, robots.txt and humans.txt. Anything else gets silently dropped and the bots will retry for a while then go away. I don't see anything in the logs beyond the root page and robots/humans.txt any more.
archive.org fucked up by making robots retroactive, if they used the archived robots.txt as a filter for a site at the relevant date, they'd have had the best of both worlds - respecting how sites work without losing how sites appeared at a date.
What the archive can do after that point is a different issue, but they clearly can keep a copy. Further, someone else is using the domain they don't nessisarily have anything to do with the archived data.
Google and others have enhanced robots.txt to enable permission for crawling (allow, sitemap), meta tags can deny archiving and various means allow permission to be explicitly denied for caching.
To use your analogy of raising a sign: if you don't put up a 'no trespassing' sign then it doesn't make trespassing legal.
FWIW I disprove of this state of affairs and consider copyright to be hugely defective in these respects.
>but they clearly can keep a copy //
It's nuanced but permission to access a page =/= permission to keep a copy. Just as you have explicit permission to access a video on YouTube but in most jurisdictions will not have permission to download it for later (commercial) use.
Right. And it's actually not a bad analogy as analogies go. Not having a sign doesn't make trespassing legal but if someone sometimes walks over a corner of your property and you go to the police to try to get him arrested, the first thing they'll probably ask you is if you have your property posted and/or if you bothered to ask him to stop. If the answer is no, they'll probably tell you to go away and do so and only come back if he ignores the sign.
The requirement to post a sign to make trespassing an actionable offence is a USA thing AIUI, it's not a UK thing at least, but copyright is almost universal and doesn't require even adding a (c) mark, it's automatic at the point of creation under the Berne Convention. Or in other words you've pushed your analogy too far and hit a marked legal difference between USA physical property law enforcement and international intellectual property law.
The more general principle is that if no harm is done and the individual/organization will just stop the action if you asked, the courts are often reluctant to get involved. There are exceptions of course, especially in the vein of making an example of someone to discourage others.
Also, it's meaningless for a bot to get permission without having permission to make a copy. There are arguments around the number of copies, but the clear implication is at lest all the routers can make a copy.
Not really. There are often default robots.txt files that the system just puts there in the course of building a default website.
The legally "right" way to do things is only archiving sites that give explicit permission to do so. But then, for all intents and purposes, you can't have a web archive. So we have the current ask forgiveness rather than permission system which works fine most of the time for organizations like the IA and AT. But it does mean that someone like the IA is inclined to err on the side of removing content if someone objects.
Further, setting up a physical device connected to a public IP is never default behavior so you are putting up the sign in either case. So, at best your argument is someone athorised to do something put up a sign by mistake saying something that was not intended, but your intent has little relevance at that point.
Worse, your argument is based on the assumption that nobody knew what was going on so even simple coursework mentioning robots.txt would demonstrate knowledge and thus intent through willful inaction.
There's a minor technical problem with that USC too, it seems. It allows archives to "reproduce no more than one copy of a work". But to compare a website you make a second [admittedly transient] copy to decide whether to re-archive. That's technically not within the scope of that 17USC108 accommodation AFAICT. This may have been solved in US law; I've a feeling there was a modification of EU law to allow transient/cache copies?
But they're not a target that you're going to collect big from, as a non-profit archive/library they're sympathetic whether or not that gives them any special legal standing, and they'll basically take down your content past and present if you ask them to.
So it will almost certainly cost you money to sue them, you won't collect much in the best case, and you can get your content taken down in about as much time as it would take you to pick a lawyer out of the phone book.
On Google? Really?
https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...
The author runs CelebrityNetWorth.com, which BusinessInsider cites, but the snippets cite BusinessInsider. So the user doesn't see the proper attribution.
a poorly written scraper may really slow down your site, especially if it wasn't intended to be scrapped repeatedly. There should be something to be said about frequency which scrapers should follow (specified by the website owner via a robots.txt like spec).
But website owners cannot demand unreasonable frequencies (such as once a year!), and what constitutes unreasonable is up for debate.
Nope, if a website wants such a restriction, it must enforce it. Robots.txt is a request. It's worthless.
Fine.
> Stop complaining when someone saves it.
Fine.
What you don't say is that it is fine to recreate and publish that content against the owner's wishes, especially when said content is copyrighted in one way or another. You're failing to see the whole picture from the content owner's point of view.
For instance, is it OK to crawl a blog with explicit copyright, save that data, then publish it elsewhere?
Thats inviting lawsuits they can't win and expecting people to pay the bandwidth for it too.