@joe @SecurityWriter It's taken on the aspect of a measure-countermeasure escalation war and AI ingestion agents now account for a huge percentage of overall web traffic, which is hugely costly to site operators, so this goes well beyond the obvious copyright and terms of service violations into something that IMO defacto qualifies as something akin to a denial of service attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

@joe @SecurityWriter The web has literally had standards for web developers to indicate that a site should be excluded from web crawlers since at least 1994. AI Crawlers have been blatantly ignoring terms of service and crawler exclusion and often adopt obscuration techniques to make it ever more difficult for site admins to block them in various technological ways.

@joe @SecurityWriter Quite a lot of sites have updated their terms of service explicitly stating that the site's content is for use by humans alone and that automated tools are prohibited. You pretty much can't read a book or listen to an audio book without hearing some disclaimer at the end forbidding the use of AI ingestion.

@SecurityWriter That's about how I feel as well. These companies are going out and scrapping enormous amounts of copyrighted content, many off sites which have published terms of service and which have obvious flags against scraping and inclusion in search indexes. This company did no more to them than they did to others. Both did wrong.