5 ms·

I'm curious as to why it's not considered to be a DMCA circumvention of a technology.

• JohnFen 4y ago
  IANAL, but here's the relevant part of the law: “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” I'm guessing that because robots.txt does not actually attempt to prevent access, it also doesn't "effectively control access" and so isn't covered by this. The clear intent of the law is to prevent actual cracking of access controls.
  • darreninthenet 4y ago
    So playing devils advocate, isn't it supposed to prevent crawlers (etc) from reading (ie accessing) those web pages?
    • JohnFen 4y ago
      I'm not sure how the law would be interpreted, but from my technical viewpoint, robots.txt is not an access control at all because it makes no attempt at controlling access. It's merely advisory, no different than if you put a readme.txt that said "I don't want xxx to come here". There are other mechanisms to do actual access control if that's what the site owner wants.
      • darreninthenet 4y ago
        Still playing DA, would a notice page saying "only authorised user past this page <NEXT>" constitute an access control, in the strictest sense?
        • JohnFen 4y ago
          Not in my view. In my view, an "access control" is a mechanism that prevents access to unauthorized people. An advisory page like that is not preventing access, it's merely asking people not to access. I think I remember that there have been court cases that support this interpretation of the DMCA, but I'm not sure. Now, if that notice page had a login form or only allowed certain IPs to proceed, that would be an access control.