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That's a completely different situation, legally. There are existing laws saying that I am liable for bad things my bot/creation/whatever does, but a TOS works
by sam0x17 7y ago
That's a completely different situation, legally. There are existing laws saying that I am liable for bad things my bot/creation/whatever does, but a TOS works differently -- it is a contract that a human has to read and agree to. They can put in a clause saying that "by reading this document you agree to [TOS]" or "by clicking this link you agree to [TOS]" or my favorite "by using this website you agree to [TOS]". No one is using/reading/accessing anything when the Googlebot crawls a web page, and there is no way you could have a bot agree to a TOS for you. If someone wrote a "honeypot" saying that if you access this URL you owe the author $200,000, there is no way Google would now owe that person $200,000. No human being read and agreed to a contract, so there is nothing to enforce.
Now legally if you can prove that the bot author is aware of the TOS, that's a different situation, but there are a variety of situations where it is completely reasonable (search engine bots in particular) where the author will never know about the TOS.