Robo-chattel? New Legal Challenge to 'Bots

milomilo writes "Extending on the eBay vs. Bidder's Edge case, the NY Times reports (free registration required) that a Manhattan judge has granted a preliminary injunction against Verio from using 'bots to harvest up-for-renewal prospects from Register.com's WHOIS. The theory's that bots use up a piece of the target system's resources, denying its use to the owner. (Question: would search engines be different, presumably because they also confer a benefit on the target by making it findable?)"

Comments

Re:Nice link, Hemos

[Jerf]

I hate to jump on this bandwagon, but this is just way over the line Slashdot! You have a staff of people, a whole freakin' staff and you seem to spend less time on the homepage of your site then I do, all alone, on my weblog! In sheer people hours spent on the site, Katz appears kicking the ass of the entire rest of the Slashdot crew combined!

What really ticks me off is that "The Old Media", through which many people still get their news, has latched on to Slashdot as "The New Media", meaning that Slashdot will be reflecting on my own efforts, and the efforts of anybody else trying to run a 'new media' style website. This is why I post this; Slashdot's flub-ups are personal and affect us all. The flub-ups affect people running new media sites (by tarnishing the reputation in the eyes of the Old Media press who doesn't care to dig past their original generalizations), they tarnish the reputation of Open Source (as they have been labelled the spokesperson of the Open Source movement by the same collection of media entities), and they tarnish the reputation of VA Linux. (Hey, anybody at VA listening? This is not good return on your investment!)

Slashdot editors, wake up! You are not invincible. You can be replaced, and in Internet time, too. Please get some ethics, before you convince thousands or millions that the New Media doesn't have any!

Re:Nice link, Hemos

[American AC in Paris]

Who would go to Hooters in Amsterdam?

...well, it suddenly occured to me that I would go to Hooters in Amsterdam. At least, that's what my employer would think if they ever decided to check the proxy server logs. While they're fairly cool about web browsing in general, they are decidedly less cool about employees looking at "objectionable material" at work. I guess I'll need to institute a policy of proofreading Slashdot's front-page content for them, to check for things like goatse.cx links...

I'm really, really glad that the submitter didn't slip a really objectionable link in there. I'm also really, really pissed off at Slashdot for this kind of crap. This is total incompetence. (I'm not even taking into account the duplicate stories on the Chinese rocket lanunch in the Science section...)

This kind of fsck-up at virtually any other major online content provider would be grounds for immediate dismissal for the employee in question, for crying out loud. READ YOUR DAMNED FRONT PAGE SUBMISSIONS!

information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.