Before, anyone gets too cocky on the legal ramifications of robots.txt files. Let me just warn you, the person who wrote that piece is not a lawyer. It would still be irrelevant if he were. There is nothing preventing legal authorities charging you with the CFAA Act because you violated a robots.txt file. What a judge will decide is yet another unknown.

Now you may say or experts may say that they'd have no case. That may all be true, but if you get arrested, you will: have an arrest record, lose time fighting a open and shut case, spend a bunch of money on an attorney to defend yourself, most likely not have the same kind of lawyers as Google, and possibly lose the first case and go to jail. Not to mention a whole lot of stress and other intangibles.

Do not get you legal advice from friends and strangers on the Internet. Talk to a lawyer if you have questions.

Jack

--- On Mon, 1/17/11, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:

From: Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org>
Subject: Re: robots.txt question
To: "Kclug" <kclug@kclug.org>
Date: Monday, January 17, 2011, 2:50 PM

BTW for anybody interested in the legal relevance of a /robots.txt file
(basically zilch) please see http://www.robotstxt.org/faq/legal.html