Since the beginning of 2024, the demand for the content created by the Wikimedia volunteer community – especially for the 144 million images, videos, and other files on Wikimedia Commons – has grow…
At the root of this comment chain is a proposal to have laws passed about this.
People can set up their web servers however they like. It’s on them to do that, it’s their web servers. I don’t think there should be legislation about whether you’re allowed to issue perfectly ordinary HTTP requests to a public server, let the server decide how to respond to them.
Even so I think it would be totally reasonable for them to block web scrapers, as they provide better ways to download all their data.
At the root of this comment chain is a proposal to have laws passed about this.
People can set up their web servers however they like. It’s on them to do that, it’s their web servers. I don’t think there should be legislation about whether you’re allowed to issue perfectly ordinary HTTP requests to a public server, let the server decide how to respond to them.