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You can sue whenever anyone harms you


You can sue whenever.

The suit itself is the mechanism for determining whether the harm existed.

And yes, of course, this presents much opportunity for abuse.


I didn't say no one could sue, anyone can sue anyone for anything if they have the time and the money. I said I didn't think someone could sue over non-compliance with robots.txt and win.

If it were possible, someone would have done it by now. It hasn't happened because robots.txt has absolutely no legal weight whatsoever. It's entirely voluntary, which means it's perfectly legal not to volunteer.

But if you or anyone else wants to waste their time tilting at legal windmills, have fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.


You don't even need to mention robots.txt, there's plenty of people that have been sued for crawling and had to stop it and pay damages, just lookup "crawling lawsuits".


Your verbs, “sue” and “win”, are separated by ~16 words of flowery language. It’s not surprising that people gave up partway through and reacted to just the first verb.


The „well everyone can sue anyone for anything“ is a non-serious gotcha answer anyways. If someone asks „can I sue XY because of YZ“, the always mean „and have a chance of winning“. Just suing someone without any chance of winning isn’t very interesting.


"flowery language?" It's just a regular sentence with regular words in it.




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