Comment by smaudet
16 hours ago
Exactly.
> a stealth bot to access a website, digital platform, or online service in a manner that is reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden the technical or commercial operation of a website or other internet service
"stealth" - what does that mean? This is largely a meaningless term. "damage, impair, or burden" - again, too vague. It would be good to specify something specific, e.g. so many tens of thousand of damage (reciprocal to the assumed fine - a journalist or user is unlikely to be reselling data at this scale, an AI scraper may incur or inflict such costs). "that is reasonably likely to" - this phrase is doing some heavy, heavy lifting, but like others have mentioned, there aren't very many "reasonable" examples, and those have to be defined in a court of law.
Like you and others have said, the immediate reaction would be legal departments essentially banning any and all access, because there would be room for someone to file a suit, and even if you win, there's no guarantee you get your fees back...
As a human being,
"stealth" means that it's not trivial for other people to block you from crawling their shit and
"damage, impair or burden" is in the eye of the beholder, the above person trying to block you from crawling their shit
Yes there will be patent-trolls attempting to squeeze this. Which is why it would be in the crawling entities' best interest to provide electronic means to opt-out and abide by them.