1059
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
1059 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59666 readers
4487 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.