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The Internet community, however, fixed most of the problem before it could become intractable or even noticeable to mainstream audiences. A software engineer named Martijn Koster was among those discussing the issue of robot signaling on a public mailing list in 1993 and 1994. Participants, including “a majority of robot authors and other people with an interest in robots,” converged on a standard for “robots.txt,” a file that Web site authors could create that would be inconspicuous to Web surfers but in plain sight to indexing robots.106 Through robots.txt, site owners can indicate preferences about what parts of the site ought to be crawled and by whom. Consensus among some influential Web programmers on a mailing list was the only blessing this standard received: “It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there [sic] no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it. Consider it a common facility the majority of robot authors offer the WWW community to protect WWW server [sic] against unwanted accesses by their robots.”107 74 Today, nearly all Web programmers know robots.txt is the way in which sites can signal their intentions to robots, and these intentions are respected by every major search engine across differing cultures and legal jurisdictions.108 On this potentially contentious topic—search engines might well be more valuable if they indexed everything, especially content marked as something to avoid— harmony was reached without any application of law. The robots.txt standard did not address the legalities of search engines and robots; it merely provided a way to defuse many conflicts before they could even begin. The apparent legal vulnerabilities of robots.txt—its lack of ownership or backing of a large private standards setting organization, and the absence of private enforcement devices— may in fact be essential to its success.109 Law professor Jody Freeman and others have written about the increasingly important role played by private organizations in the formation of standards across a wide range of disciplines and the ways in which some organizations incorporate governmental notions of due process in their activities.110 Many Internet standards have been forged much less legalistically but still cooperatively.
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stallmans 4 freedoms
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Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]
