Original HN title: "99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots"
Not clear how the author arrived at the precise 99% figure; perhaps "99%" is a figure of speech
"And yes, my site gets its data by scraping those public documents. So I'm a scraper writing a blog post complaining about scrapers."
"I'm trying to run a business here."
What's the business
(where "business" is defined as "buying and selling")
From https://patronview.com/robots.txt
# As a condition of accessing this website, you agree to abide by the following
# content signals:
# (a) If a Content-Signal = yes, you may collect content for the corresponding
# use.
# (b) If a Content-Signal = no, you may not collect content for the
# corresponding use.
# (c) If the website operator does not include a Content-Signal for a
# corresponding use, the website operator neither grants nor restricts
# permission via Content-Signal with respect to the corresponding use.
# The content signals and their meanings are:
# search: building a search index and providing search results (e.g., returning
# hyperlinks and short excerpts from your website's contents). Search does not
# include providing AI-generated search summaries.
# ai-input: inputting content into one or more AI models (e.g., retrieval
# augmented generation, grounding, or other real-time taking of content for
# generative AI search answers).
# ai-train: training or fine-tuning AI models.
# use: how AI systems may consume the content (immediate, reference, or full).
# ANY RESTRICTIONS EXPRESSED VIA CONTENT SIGNALS ARE EXPRESS RESERVATIONS OF
# RIGHTS UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE EUROPEAN UNION DIRECTIVE 2019/790 ON COPYRIGHT
# AND RELATED RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET.
# BEGIN Cloudflare Managed content
User-agent: *
Content-Signal: search=yes,ai-train=no,use=reference
Allow: /
Perhaps this could be construed as a license, e.g., permitting or prohibiting certain uses of the "content"
If, for example, the website operator had enforceable intellectual property rights in the "content", such as copyrights, then perhaps the operator could restrict access to the "content" under the threat of litigation to enforce those rights
Basic questions
1. Is the "content" protected by intellectual property rights, e.g., copyrights
2. Does the website operator have intellectual property rights in the "content", e.g., copyrights
3. Does the website operator have agreements with the rights holders, e.g., granting the operator authorization to restrict access to the "content"