Comment by simianparrot
15 hours ago
No. Access to my content is a privilege I grant you. I decide how you get to access it, and via a bot that my setup confuses for an AI crawler belonging to an anti-human AI corporation is not a valid way to access it. Get off my virtual lawn.
> No. Access to my content is a privilege I grant you.
Right, I thought the conversation was about public websites on the public internet, but I think you're talking about this in the context of a private website now? I understand keeping tighter controls if you're dealing with private content you want accessible via the internet for others but not the public.
All websites are private (excepting maybe government sites). In most places the internet infrastructure itself is private.
You're conflating a legal concept that applies to areas that are shared, government owned, paid for by taxes, and the government feels like people should be able to access them.
The web is closer to a shopping mall. You're on one persons property to access other people's stuff who pay to be there. They set their own rules. If you don't follow those rules you get kicked out, charged with trespassing, and possibly banned from the mall entire.
AI bots have been asked to leave. But, since they own the mall too, the store owners are more than a little screwed.
> You're on one persons property to access other people's stuff who pay to be there.
I see it more like I'm knocking on people's doors (issuing GET requests with my web browser) and people open their door for me (the server responds with something) or not. If you don't wanna open the door, fine you do you, but if you do open the door, I'm gonna assume it was on purpose as I'm not trying to be malicious, I'm just a user with a browser.
> AI bots have been asked to leave. But, since they own the mall too, the store owners are more than a little screwed.
I don't understand what you mean with this, what is the mall here, are you're saying that people have websites hosted at OpenAI et al? I'm not sure how the "mall owner" and the people running the AI bots are the same owners.
You’re literally visiting a service paid for by me. It’s open to the public, but it’s my domain and my server and I get to say “no thank you” to your visit if you don’t behave. You have no innate right to access the content I share.
Blocking misbehaving IP addresses isn’t new, and is another version of the same principle.
> but it’s my domain and my server and I get to say “no thank you” to your visit if you don’t behave [...] Blocking misbehaving IP addresses isn’t new
Absolutely, I agree that of course people are free to block whatever they want, misbehaving or not. Guess I'm just trying to figure out what sort of "collateral damage" people are OK with when putting up content on the public internet but want it to be selectively available.
> You have no innate right to access the content I share.
No, I guess that's true, I don't have any "rights" to do so. But I am gonna assume that if whatever you host is available without any authentication, protection or similar, you're fine with me viewing that. I'm not saying you should be fine with 1000s of requests per second, but since you made it public in the first place by sharing it, you kind of implicitly agreed for others to view it.
This interpretation won't take you that far.
Crawling-prevention is not new. Many news outlets or biggish websites already was preventing access by non-human agents in various ways for a very long time.
Now, non-human agents are improved and started to leech everything they can find, so the methods are evolving, too.
News outlets are also public sites on the public internet.
Source-available code repositories are also on the public internet, but said agents crawl and use that code, too, backed by fair-use claims.