• tomalley8342@lemmy.world
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    7 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.

    • Glitchvid@lemmy.world
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      56 seconds 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 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.