I apologize if this topic has already been discussed in this capacity. I tried to search for something similar but it either hasn't been or I didn't try the right combination of keywords.
Since I have been thrown into this whole mess I have been kind of interested in how legally stable it would be to add something to a site's terms of service stating that crawler and bot activity is prohibited. Say for example that I put the correct meta tags, robots.txt, .htaccess, and additional scripts in place that (at least attempt to) completely block crawler activity. I would then state in my terms of use that I have made a reasonable and faithful effort to prohibit all types of bots and crawlers and that any such traffic is a violation of my terms and an intrusion into my site.
As many of us know, crawlers and such can eat up 50% or greater of our system resources. In periods of high traffic, that literally means that legitimate users cannot access the site. Some might even call that denial of service.
My thinking is also that if PicScout or something else would find an image and they would attempt to sue, you could question the means by which the image was discovered. If it was discovered that a banned tool was used, could you then show the terms of service, the methods used to block such a tool, and prove that the means of discovery is considered to be a system intrusion? I certainly don't desire that type of traffic on any of my sites. I only allow Google and Bing because they actually bring positive traffic to my site in most cases. Even in cases where all images are legal I would not want to waste my bandwidth on such a tool that is only seeking to catch me in potential wrongdoing.
To me it seems like if police were randomly walking down the street and letting themselves into your house to browse around just because you have a standard door and windows on your dwelling. Sure, you open your house to people who are welcome but you make efforts to lock doors and windows and keep most other people out.
I realize this would be an extremely gray area because they you might be able to potentially define all kind of other strange things in your terms. It just seems that something to that effect would be reasonable since there are valid concerns about bandwidth usage. The fact that you can ask Google, Bing, The Internet Archive, and any other respectable bot not to crawl your site and they will obey your wishes seems that it would also be reasonable.
Thoughts?
Since I have been thrown into this whole mess I have been kind of interested in how legally stable it would be to add something to a site's terms of service stating that crawler and bot activity is prohibited. Say for example that I put the correct meta tags, robots.txt, .htaccess, and additional scripts in place that (at least attempt to) completely block crawler activity. I would then state in my terms of use that I have made a reasonable and faithful effort to prohibit all types of bots and crawlers and that any such traffic is a violation of my terms and an intrusion into my site.
As many of us know, crawlers and such can eat up 50% or greater of our system resources. In periods of high traffic, that literally means that legitimate users cannot access the site. Some might even call that denial of service.
My thinking is also that if PicScout or something else would find an image and they would attempt to sue, you could question the means by which the image was discovered. If it was discovered that a banned tool was used, could you then show the terms of service, the methods used to block such a tool, and prove that the means of discovery is considered to be a system intrusion? I certainly don't desire that type of traffic on any of my sites. I only allow Google and Bing because they actually bring positive traffic to my site in most cases. Even in cases where all images are legal I would not want to waste my bandwidth on such a tool that is only seeking to catch me in potential wrongdoing.
To me it seems like if police were randomly walking down the street and letting themselves into your house to browse around just because you have a standard door and windows on your dwelling. Sure, you open your house to people who are welcome but you make efforts to lock doors and windows and keep most other people out.
I realize this would be an extremely gray area because they you might be able to potentially define all kind of other strange things in your terms. It just seems that something to that effect would be reasonable since there are valid concerns about bandwidth usage. The fact that you can ask Google, Bing, The Internet Archive, and any other respectable bot not to crawl your site and they will obey your wishes seems that it would also be reasonable.
Thoughts?