Comment

Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall

EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

source

Sort:hotnew top

cm0002@piefed.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You say, just as news breaks that the top German court has over turned a decision that declared "AD blocking isn't piracy"

source
- EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Unauthorized access into a computer system and “Piracy” are two very different things.
  
  source
  - cm0002@piefed.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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
    
    source
    EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m not saying courts couldn’t pass a new law saying whatever they want. But the laws we have today would not allow for ad blocking to be considered unauthorized access. Not in the U.S. at least.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

gaining unauthorized access to a computer system

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.

source
- finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Site owners currently do and should have the freedom to decide who is and is not allowed to access the data, and to decide for what purpose it gets used for. Idgaf if you think scraping is malicious or not, it is and should be illegal to violate clear and obvious barriers against them at the cost of the owners and unsanctioned profit of the scrapers off of the work of the site owners.
  
  source
  - GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    to decide for what purpose it gets used for
    
    Yeah, fuck everything about that. If I’m a site visitor I should be able to do what I want with the data you send me. If I bypass your ads, or use your words to write a newspaper article that you don’t like, tough shit. Publishing information is choosing not to control what happens to the information after it leaves your control.
    
    Don’t like it? Make me sign an NDA. And even then, violating an NDA isn’t a crime, much less a felony punishable by years of prison time.
    
    Interpreting the CFAA to cover scraping is absurd and draconian.
    
    source
    finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If you want anybody and everyone to be able to use everything you post for any purpose, right on, good for you, but don’t try to force your morality on others who rely on their writing and artworks to make a living to survive.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  source
  - GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    That doesn’t logically follow so no, that would not make an ad blocker unauthorized under the CFAA.
    
    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.
    
    To purposefully circumvent that access would be considered unauthorized.
    
    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.
    
    source
- Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
  source
  - Aatube@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
    
    source
  - tomalley8342@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
    
    source
    Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Do you think DoS/DDoS activities should be criminal?
    
    If you’re a site operator and the mass AI scraping is genuinely causing operational problems (not hard to imagine, I’ve seen what it does to my hosted repositories pages) should there be recourse? Especially if you’re actively trying to prevent that activity (revoking consent in cookies, authorization captchas).
    
    In general I think the idea of “your right to swing your fists ends at my face” applies reasonably well here — these AI scraping companies are giving lots of admins bloody noses and need to be held accountable.
    
    I really am amenable to your arguments wrt the right to an open web, but look at how many sites are hiding behind CF and other portals, or outright becoming hostile to any scraping at all; we’re already seeing the rapid death of the ideal because of these malicious scrapers, and we should be using all available recourse to stop this bleeding.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - ubergeek@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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 are doing.
    
    Silly plebe! Those laws are there to target the working class, not to be used against corporations. See: Copyright.
    
    source
    RangerAndTheCat@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Image
    
    source
Demdaru@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

source
- gian@lemmy.grys.it ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Carefull, this way even not looking at an ads positioned at the bottom of the page (or anyway not visible without scrolling) would mean to remove authorisation brought to you by ads.
  
  source
- EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.
  
  source
- HK65@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There was no header on the request saying I want ads though
  
  source