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AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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We need laws mandating respect of
robots.txt. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuffIt's a bad solution to a problem anyway. If we are going to legally mandate a solution I want to take the opportunity to come up with an actually better fix than the hacky solution that is robots.txt
AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That's what they're trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they'll get away with it.
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?
Sure as long as the party of law and order respects law. And order.
I just wish the push and pull of politics didn't have to be played as a zero sum game. I wish someone could take the initiative and just...
I think both parties in America sing pretty loud about "law and order." I haven't heard that cry particularly loudly from either side over the other. I don't think I've heard anyone who claims to be a Democrat saying the end goal is "small government" but I have heard it from Republican voices.
Honestly, I would really prefer if we were in a system that enabled more parties, so we didn't have "parties" that did such contradictory things as the current ones...
The GOP has historically been the party of law and order. Hence why they implied that blue lives matter more than black lives.
thatsthejoke.png
Just like how one party impeached a president of the other for obstruction and abuse of power, and the other impeached a president for checks notes lying about a blowjob.
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
Are you aware of what "unlisted" means?
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:
There's also no law against visiting an unlisted webpage? What?
Sounds like the type of thing that would either be unenforceable or profitable to violate compared to the fines.
Why? What would you like to achieve and how would that help?
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.
The law can be broad with allowances to define specifics by decree, executive order or the equivalent.
robots.txt is a 30 year old standard. If we can write common sense laws around things like email and VoIP, we can do it for web standards too.
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.
Copyright law in general needs changing though that's the real problem. I don't see the advantage of legally mandating that a hacky workaround solution becomes a legally mandated requirement.
Especially because there are many many legitimate reasons to ignore robots.txt including it being misconfigured or it just been set up for search engines when your bot isn't a search engine crawler.
All my scrapping scripts go to shit...please no, I need automation to live...