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Internet Archive to New York: Don’t Kill the Good Bots in the Fight Against Bad Bots | Internet Archive Blogs
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New York’s Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act could force all automated web tools to disclose their identity, potentially blocking beneficial bots used for archiving, research, and journalism.
If enacted, the law would let news publishers demand disclosure from any bot operator without proof of harm, creating a legal lever to suppress public-interest tools. Engineers maintaining crawlers, archives, or research bots may face new compliance burdens or outright blocking. The bill’s narrow focus on news sites leaves other strained services like Wikipedia unprotected while still risking collateral damage to civic infrastructure.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act requires bots to disclose identity, affiliation, and purpose to access news sites.
News publishers could demand disclosure and pursue legal action without demonstrating harm, enabling retaliation against public-interest bots.
The law targets news sites only, ignoring other services like Wikipedia that also suffer from abusive scraping.
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What elseif makes of it.
The Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act shifts the burden of proof from publishers to bot operators. Under the proposed law, any news site can demand identification from an automated tool without first showing evidence of harm. This reverses the current dynamic, where publishers must demonstrate abuse before taking action. For engineers, this means any crawler, archive bot, or research tool interacting with New York-based news sites would need to preemptively disclose its operators, purpose, and potential data uses. The cost isn’t just administrative; it’s the risk of being blocked or legally targeted for activities that were previously uncontroversial, like archiving disappearing content or studying web security.
The law’s scope is both too broad and too narrow. It applies only to news websites, leaving other high-value targets of abusive scraping, like Wikipedia or public libraries, without legal recourse. Yet within its scope, it captures all automated access, regardless of intent. A bot preserving endangered digital content would face the same disclosure requirements as one scraping for AI training data. This blunt approach fails to distinguish between harmful scraping and public-interest automation. For engineers, the consequence is a fragmented legal landscape: compliance for news sites, but no protection for other services they may rely on or maintain.
The bill’s disclosure requirements create a chilling effect on civic infrastructure. Libraries, journalists, and researchers often use bots to uncover corporate misconduct, archive at-risk content, or test security vulnerabilities. Mandatory identification would allow publishers to block or retaliate against these tools, undermining their ability to operate independently. The Internet Archive and EFF argue that the real problem, excessive, harmful scraping, can be addressed with targeted measures, like rate-limiting or legal action against proven abusers. The current proposal, however, hands publishers a tool to dismantle the very tools that hold power accountable, without solving the underlying issue.
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