I fucked with the title a bit. What i linked to was actually a mastodon post linking to an actual thing. but in my defense, i found it because cory doctorow boosted it, so, in a way, i am providing the original source here.
please argue. please do not remove.
That’s exactly what robot.txt is… they spell out that they don’t want you to access this site with an automated system.
right. so hiring 50 college kids to manually visit every page and cache it for study is fine.
That would probably be more expensive than just paying companies. But it is morally different because a human did visit their website so their good will was not violated as they expressed this consent when they published the website.