Re: Business owners are such babies
On the other hand, he does have a point regarding website data scraping. According to the article, under current US law, if you publish something on the web, it's legal for anyone to then scrape it. What they use it for afterwards might be a legal grey area, possibly even directly illegal. But the general thrust is that your data can be legally taken, even if it impacts on the performance of your servers to the detriment of the intended users. This applies even if the data isn't your, but user generated too. This seems to go against the spirit of the internet and the web in a big way. It's already bitten service providers offering "unlimited use"[*] contracts that then get abused by some users downloading at full speed 24/7 such that they had to add "fair use" clauses when the numbers of people taking the "unlimited" term literally grew too high.. Same could be said of an "All You Can Eat" buffet. Some people will go over the the top, abuse the system, and fill up multiple plates and waste much of the food.
When we have grey areas in the law, there will always be some fuckwit who pushes the boundaries because they need a hard line with a sign saying "Do Not Cross" before they stop, they just can't seem to cope with the "reasonable doubt" of a fuzzy area, almost always to the detriment of the normal, reasonable people who can see that grey area "boundary" and treat it as a sensible warning, keeping clear and only pushing it gently now and then.
Musk may be a twat, but even a stopped clock is correct twice per day.
[*] lets not get into the argument about "unlimited data" and lack of provision for obvious and expected increases in usage by service providers.