On 11/24/20 5:12 PM, Nick Thomas wrote: > On Tue, 2020-11-24 at 13:31 +0000, James Tomasino wrote: >> As much as I'd love to wave a magic wand and say, "it's all opt-in >> here" we don't really have any legal footing to do so. >> > James and I talked a bit more about this one on IRC. Key to this > argument, AIUI, is how robots.txt (or the lack of it) is treated for > FTP, which lacks any mention of it in the spec but has apparently been > given weight in DMCA-related rulings involving it. > > I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning, which goes something like "the > robots.txt Internet-Draft is already de-jure part of Gemini, and we > can't change that", but IANAL ^^. In particular, I've been thinking > about this almost entirely in GDPR terms so far, and have a bunch of > DMCA-related reading to do now. In addition to FTP, gopher adopted the robots.txt standard almost immediately: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.internet.net-happenings/c/Iv8ylGxvoh8?pli=1 You can read the IETF spec for the Robots Exclusion Protocol here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rep-wg-topic-00 As you'll note in "2.3. Access method", their documentation isn't scheme specific and they even list FTP as a valid option. This is the document that will be used in court by anyone defending an indexer and any exclusion you want to obtain for Gemini would need to happen there. Having a contradictory statement in the Gemini spec will not stand up against the history and precedence of this one. If you want to implement stronger protections in Gemini then I'd suggest adding a note in the best-practices document for server creators to (as Nick suggested) serve a robots.txt if no such file exists with the contents: User-agent: * Disallow: / That achieves your aim of block-by-default and the opt-in would be the creation of a robots.txt file of your own.
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