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Comment by whostolemyhat | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you go to another country and you don't know the laws, you will still get arrested if you break the law.

Sure. That's the starting point in that case. The question is whether it can be seen as the starting assumption of someone making a http request that it's a "service" for which I'm assumed to find, read and follow the terms of?

I'm guessing that varies and is decided by legal precedent only once it becomes an issue.

Most countries apply intellectual property law to anything published on the internet. In other words, when it comes to something you pull down via http, you should assume that, if you attempt to republish it in any form, someone out there might decide that it's worth their time to use the court system to destroy you, so you should take the time to read the ToS.

Yes - Like I said I think it's perfectly find that the material I download from the internet has terms and laws associated with it. That is, what I do with what I download is subject to laws as soon as I e.g. try to publish it.

But my point is this: what service have I used, and what terms can I be assumed to have agreed to if I do this

    > wget $random_url > /dev/null

That's what web scraping is. What I do with the scraped material is something completely different.

In that case, you are bound to these terms of service: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616

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