Is there a law against it? I thought robots.txt is more of a convention. However...

chollida1 · on Nov 23, 2009

> Is there a law against it?

I don't know. I'd imagine that there isn't a law specifically written for robots.txt and scraping.

If a case went to court I'd imagine it would be settled based on laws meant for things like "keep out" and "No trespassing" signs:)

itgoon · on Nov 23, 2009

I think not heeding robots.txt would cause them more problems than it would solve.

Currently, it gets used for more than "deny/allow all" - it is selective. If I have to worry about stuff I don't want indexed being indexed, then I'm going to block all crawling. Yes, I know that wouldn't be easy, but I wouldn't be alone in my sentiment.