As suggested by Abigail-II in Re: Web Robot, a polite robot should:

I was further interested to learn in Chip Salzenberg's letter at geeksunite that: "Federal courts have upheld that web spiders must obey the established robots.txt mechanism by which web site owners limit automated access and that a failure to obey robots.txt constitutes trespass".

However, I'm confused about who robots.txt is intended for. I understand robots.txt applies to heavy duty web spiders and indexers, such as a Google robot. But does it also apply to little screen scraping tools written by private individuals? For example, suppose I write a little tool using LWP::UserAgent or WWW::Mechanize (rather than LWP::RobotUA or WWW::Mechanize::Polite ?, say) that simply collects a number of web pages for me while I sleep. Is it illegal or unethical for such a scraper to ignore robots.txt?

If a commercial company sells a tool that allows non-programmer end users to write little screen scraping robots, is it unethical or illegal for such a product to not provide a mechanism to allow their end users to respect robots.txt?

In reply to [OT] Ethical and Legal Screen Scraping by eyepopslikeamosquito

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.