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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

I guess this means the web is lawfully seen as belonging to the public which seems both good and bad, because while it might be publicly accessible as a whole, each individual site is privately owned.

I'm pretty sure with any brick and mortar business, as a business owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without having to provide a reason.

That would be the equivalent of allowing to block bots / unwanted traffic on your site, except the brick and mortar case is way easier to prevent. If the person won't leave your physical business, you can have them removed by the police but to prevent a bot the burden is fully on you as a site owner.

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> I'm pretty sure with any brick and mortar business, as a business owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without having to provide a reason.

It depends, you aren't allowed to restrict access for privileged reasons (i.e. banning all black people from your business is a clear case of discrimination and is specifically illegal), but otherwise you have a lot of levity to refuse persons entry - but that "without having to provide a reason" is just apparent because it is very infrequently challenged - if someone feels they were wrongly refused service they absolutely have the right to sue and require you to state why that ban took place, but, as your business is owned by you a ban made by you is legal until overturned, either early (as in a preliminary injection) or as a result (after the ruling on a case).

It's hard to pull real world analogies for this case, as well, since Amazon is never worried about other customers being dissuaded from a purchase because I'm shopping in my boxers, or am shouting and creating an unsafe environment - so there's a limit to how well you could tune a real world example to this scenario... but I might give it a try with this:

I run an absolutely 'grammable business, there's bubbly pink champagne and gold everywhere - including the stoop. I like to use that fancy stoop to attract new customers but I've been a bit concerned lately that a city tour guide has regularly been bringing around their tour and they're taking selfies of my business from across the street - that tour guide is profiting from the decoration I've put into my stoop and some of those tourists might've been willing to pay the modest 300$ fee to walk in and take selfies inside! So I try to get the city to restrict the tour guide from being able to lead his tourists to take selfies from across the street. It's very possible I could remove the glitzy decorations from my stoop but that would impair my advertising, which I don't want to do - instead I want to legally restrict people from using my stoop in a manner I did not intend.

I think that's pretty apt in a few ways but it also misses the fact that LinkedIn is technically paying a bit of money every time someone loads a page - and if the tour guide was noticeably damaging my stoop I would be able to sue him for damages and probably win, but the cost of that page load is so utterly negligible that maybe we can ignore it.

> as an owner you are legally allowed to disallow service to anyone without having to provide a reason

as a website owner you absolutely have the right to limit who does or doesn't visit your site, but that's up to you to enforce. Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal?

> Scraping is literally equivalent to reading a giant public billboard and writing what it says somewhere else. How could that be illegal?

If you treat the website you're visiting as a privately owned business then you're trespassing on private property by scraping their site, assuming that site is trying to prevent that behavior.

If you don't treat the website as a privately owned business, then what do you classify it as? It can't be considered in the public domain because someone owns, operates and pays for the resources to make the site work. It is the site owner's private property IMO. By having the site public, they are inviting the world to check it out but they should have the right to disallow service.

Also, if the internet is supposed to be distributed and each site is an independent node on the system, how is that any different than an independently owned brick and mortar business operating in some location? In this case the physical world is "the internet".

It's not a clear cut thing, and I hate the idea of censorship, but I can't see this case's outcome becoming the norm. There's too many loop holes. Like, is going to your site 50 thousand times a second hoping to get new information from the public billboard a legal move?

Or, to put it another way, I'm pretty sure if you were able to mind control people and you commanded a billion people to flood a physical business so that it could not operate and serve its customers this would be quickly seen as an unlawful move in the physical world. You would probably get shut down by the state or government too for disrupting service for neighboring businesses and citizens.

You treat it as a public-facing building storefront, with you standing outside and taking pictures.

As long as there are big glass windows, the patrons and the information gained from looking inside are not subject to privacy, and are thus freely accessible to anyone walking by.

What you're not entitled to is the backend workings of the website - the application/code/databases, and credentials. It would be akin to going into a restaurant and forcing yourself into the food prep area and stealing the owner's keys, and contaminating the food that patrons eat.

Scraping too often would be something akin to setting up a camera tripod right in the building entrance, hindering the influx of new customers. While not explicitly illegal, it does hinder the operation of the business, and you will probably be physically removed at some point (this is banning abusive bots, etc.)

Yeah, but this is slightly different. This is about a business owner trying to control who can look through the windows.

> Yeah, but this is slightly different. This is about a business owner trying to control who can look through the windows.

Is it any different tho?

I don't think there's a clean analogy for window shopping on the web.

If you visit example.com to take a look at the site then you are really inside of example.com's business / store front. Their servers are spending resources to serve your traffic. The doors have been opened.

I also think a brick and mortar business has the right to prevent you from (literally) window shopping too because if you enter the land that they own (or are renting) and they do not want to serve you then you are trespassing on private property.

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