Microblog Memes

Well, let's turn this situation around then and see how it changes.

I hammer Meta's backend services with 6.8m requests per second, ignoring all posted guidelines, absorbing all the data I can get my hands on from them and feeding it to my machine which is busy trying to build BaseFook based on Meta's data that I've harvested from them.

Criminal DDOS? What's that?

Copyright law? Surely this doesn't apply to this.

Unauthorized access to backend systems? Nah, we'll be fine, that's definitely legal.

....

It is currently true that robots.txt doesn't have legal teeth and relies on voluntary compliance, but there have been court cases involving it in the past, and in my opinion they should have resulted in an established legal precedent. Check these out (courtesy of Wikipedia:)

The robots.txt played a role in the 1999 legal case of eBay v. Bidder's Edge,[12] where eBay attempted to block a bot that did not comply with robots.txt, and in May 2000 a court ordered the company operating the bot to stop crawling eBay's servers using any automatic means, by legal injunction on the basis of trespassing.[13][14][12] Bidder's Edge appealed the ruling, but agreed in March 2001 to drop the appeal, pay an undisclosed amount to eBay, and stop accessing eBay's auction information.[15][16]

In 2007 Healthcare Advocates v. Harding, a company was sued for accessing protected web pages archived via The Wayback Machine, despite robots.txt rules denying those pages from the archive. A Pennsylvania court ruled "in this situation, the robots.txt file qualifies as a technological measure" under the DMCA. Due to a malfunction at Internet Archive, Harding could temporarly access these pages from the archive and thus the court found "the Harding firm did not circumvent the protective measure".[17][18][19]

In 2013 Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc. the Associated Press sued Meltwater for copyright infringement and misappropriation over copying of AP news items. Meltwater claimed that they did not require a license and that it was fair use, because the content was freely available and not protected by robots.txt. The court decided in March 2013 that "Meltwater’s copying is not protected by the fair use doctrine", mentioning among several factors that "failure […] to employ the robots.txt protocol did not give Meltwater […] license to copy and publish AP content".[20]