They already prosecute people under the unauthorized access provision. They just don’t prosecute rich people under it.
Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 9 hours agoFuck that. I don’t need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn’t want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an “inspect element” tag.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 hours ago
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
They prosecuted and convicted a guy under the CFAA for figuring out the URL schema for an AT&T website designed to be accessed by the iPad when it first launched, and then just visiting that site by trying every URL in a script. And then his lawyer (the foremost expert on the CFAA) got his conviction overturned:
www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer
We have to maintain that fight, to make sure that the legal system doesn’t criminalize normal computer tinkering, like using scripts or even browser settings in ways that site owners don’t approve of.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
That logic would not extend to ad blockers, as the point of concern is gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or asset. Blocking ads would not be considered gaining unauthorized access to anything. In fact it would be the opposite of that.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
And my point is that defining “unauthorized” to include visitors using unauthorized tools/methods to access a publicly visible resource would be a policy disaster.
If I put a banner on my site that says “by visiting my site you agree not to modify the scripts or ads displayed on the site,” does that make my visit with an ad blocker “unauthorized” under the CFAA? I think the answer should obviously be “no,” and that the way to define “authorization” is whether the website puts up some kind of login/authentication mechanism to block or allow specific users, not to put a simple request to the visiting public to please respect the rules of the site.
To me, a robots.txt is more like a friendly request to unauthenticated visitors than it is a technical implementation of some kind of authentication mechanism.
Scraping isn’t hacking. I agree with the Third Circuit and the EFF: If the website owner makes a resource available to visitors without authentication, then accessing those resources isn’t a crime, even if the website owner didn’t intend for site visitors to use that specific method.
Glitchvid@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
When sites put challenges like Anubis or other measures to authenticate that the viewer isn’t a robot, but they employ measures to thwart that authentication (via spoofing or other means) I think that’s a reasonable violation of the CFAA in spirit — especially since these mass scraping activities are getting attention for the damage they are causing to site operators (another factor in the CFAA, and a factor that would promote this to felony activity.)
The fact is these laws are already on the books, we may as well utilize them to shut down this objectively harmful activity AI scrapers doing.
Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
That same logic is how Aaron Swartz was cornered into suicide for scraping JSTOR, something widely agreed to be a bad idea by a wide range of lawspeople including SCOTUS in its 2021 decision Van Buren v. US that struck this interpretation off the books.
ubergeek@lemmy.today 7 hours ago
Silly plebe! Those laws are there to target the working class, not to be used against corporations. See: Copyright.
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Nah, that would also mean using Newpipe, YoutubeDL, Revanced, and Tachiyomi would be a crime, and it would only take the re-introduction of WEI to extend that criminalization to the rest of the web ecosystem. It would be extremely shortsighted and foolish of me to cheer on the criminalization of user spoofing and browser automation because of this.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
How would you “authorize” a user to access assets served by your systems based on what they do with them after they’ve accessed them? That doesn’t logically follow so no, that would not make an ad blocker unauthorized under the CFAA. Especially because you’re not actually taking any steps to deny these people access either.
AI scrapers on the other hand are a type of users that you’re not authorizing to begin with, and if you’re using CloudFlares bot protection you’re putting into place a system to deny them access. To purposefully circumvent that access would be considered unauthorized.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The CFAA also criminalizes “exceeding authorized access” in every place it criminalizes accessing without authorization. My position is that mere permission (in a colloquial sense, not necessarily technical IT permissions) isn’t enough to define authorization. Social expectations and even contractual restrictions shouldn’t be enough to define “authorization” in this criminal statute.
Even as a normal non-bot user who sees the cloudflare landing page because they’re on a VPN or happen to share an IP address with someone who was abusing the network? No, circumventing those gatekeeping functions is no different than circumventing a paywall on a newspaper website by deleting cookies or something. Or using a VPN or relay to get around rate limiting.
The idea of criminalizing scrapers or scripts would be a policy disaster.
cm0002@piefed.world 6 hours ago
You say, just as news breaks that the top German court has over turned a decision that declared "AD blocking isn't piracy"
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Unauthorized access into a computer system and “Piracy” are two very different things.
cm0002@piefed.world 6 hours ago
Please instruct me on how I go to the timeline where the legal system always makes decisions based on logic, reasoning, evidence and fairness and not...the opposite...of all those things
You have a lot of trust placed in the courts to actually do the right thing
Demdaru@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Ehhhh, you are gaining access to content due to assumption you are going to interact with ads and thus, bring revenue to the person and/or company producing said content. If you block ads, you remove authorisation brought to you by ads.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
That doesn’t make any logical sense. You cant tie legal authorization to an unsaid implicit assumption, especially when that is in turn based on what you do with the content you’ve retrieved from a system after you’ve accessed and retrieved it.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
There was no header on the request saying I want ads though