We Need a Class Action Lawsuit Against AI Companies
They are not respecting `robots.txt` and it's costing maintainers of open sites an enormous amount of time and money: time trying to keep their sites up and money for server bandwidth and compute.
We need someone to begin a class action lawsuit against the AI companies to try to force them to respect `robots.txt` and to pay damages to compensate organizations and developers for all the time, bandwidth, and compute they are stealing.
Honestly, `robots.txt` should be enough to hold them accountable, but if it's not legally enough, then adding an item to Terms of Service explicitly denying usage for AI crawling ought to hold up in court.
Logging the IP of every request and tracking additional bandwidth and compute because of them should provide all the evidence needed.
We shouldn't _have_ to do this. But here we are. Are there any orgs that have been harmed who have the resources to form a coalition and take this on?