We need laws mandating respect of robots.txt. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuff
The battle cry of conservatives everywhere: It’s too hard!
Except if it involves oppressing minorities and women. Then it’s a moral imperative worth all the time and money you can shovel at it regardless of whether the desired outcome is realistic or not.
Seriously, could the party of “small government” get out of my business, please?
Turning that into a law is ridiculous - you really can’t consider that more than advisory unless you enforce it with technical means. For example, maybe put it behind a login or captcha if you want only humans to see it
Yes, and there’s also no law against calling an unlisted phone number
Also we already had this battle with robots.txt. In the beginning, search engines wouldn’t honor it either because they wanted the competitive advantage of more info, and websites trusted it too much and tried to wall off too much info that way.
There were complaints, bad pr, lawsuits, call for a law
It’s no longer the Wild West:
- search engines are mature and generally honor robots.txt
- websites use rate limiting to conserve resources and user logins to fence off data there’s a reason to fence off
- truce: neither side is as greedy
- there is no such law nor is that reasonable
I hope not, laws tend to get outdated real fast. Who knows robots.txt might not even be used in the future and it just there adding space because of law reasons.
You can describe the law in a similar way to a specification, and you can make it as broad as needed. Something like the file name shouldn’t ever come up as an issue.
robots.txt has been an unofficial standard for 30 years and its augmented with sitemap.xml to help index uncrawlable pages, and Schema.org to expose contents for Semantic Web. I’m not stating it shouldn’t not be a law, but to suggest changing norms as a reason is a pretty weak counterargument, man.
We don’t need new laws we just need enforcement of existing laws. It is already illegal to copy copyrighted content, it’s just that the AI companies do it anyway and no one does anything about it.
Enforcing respect for robots.txt doesn’t matter because the AI companies are already breaking the law.
I think the issue is that existing laws don’t clearly draw a line that AI can cross. New laws may very well be necessary if you want any chance at enforcement.
And without a law that defines documents like robots.txt as binding, enforcing respect for it isn’t “unnecessary”, it is impossible.
I see no logic in complaining about lack of enforcement while actively opposing the ability to meaningfully enforce.
