I never suggested robots.txt was "fair", I suggested it is a cultural convention long established at this point and ignoring it is wrong for moral reasons nothi

I never suggested robots.txt was "fair", I suggested it is a cultural convention long established at this point and ignoring it is wrong for moral reasons nothing to do with legal reasons. Morals/ethics and laws are different frameworks (though, related, naturally, and hopefully interacting). I don't think I've lost the plot when talking about automatic copyright. The article's suggestion that copyright notices should be more useful than robots.txt only makes sense if you assume that copyright applies in general and LLM scraping is not fair use. Following that assumption to its logical conclusion then automatic copyright is a legal problem for all crawling/scraping by the LLM companies and they are at drastic legal risk for that. Beyond the already huge issues with their moral/ethical risk in doing that and ignoring things like robots.txt files. "LLM crawlers should ignore robots.txt and instead look for CC licenses and copyright notices" is only good moral "advice" if you think model trainers will eventually lose the "fair use" argument and from that standpoint it is both ethically and legally wrong from the automatic copyright protection standpoint to suggest stuff without META tags or visible copyright notices is "fair game"/"uncopyrighted". In the case that we are presuming "fair use" can apply to this data, then all arguments about which copyright licenses to claim is indeed facile, because it doesn't matter, but that's not an interesting argument to have here. If robots.txt isn't the answer and copyright claims aren't the answer: what is? At that point, yes, all legal protections cease. If they've already proven to be a bad actor (ethically speaking) willing to ignore robots.txt, what hope do you have that they won't ignore llms-please-ignore-this-site.txt or X-LLM: Please Ignore headers or anything else? There's not really a discussion to have in that case, just a judgment to make that whatever those companies are: that's evil and unethical. (Call that if you like a strong opinion, but that's how ethics works, in the court of public opinion.)