The Logic of Regulating Web Crawlers:Advocating for Preceding Administrative Oversight
Web crawlers are an indispensable technology in the digital age,but they are also susceptible to misuse for illegal activities.The ambiguity surrounding their boundaries has led to several challenges in legal regulation.This is primarily manifested in the circumvention and absence of regulatory oversight and the disorderly and contradictory judicial evaluations.In criminal law,these challenges are evident in the unstable application of charges,which vacillate between data-related crimes and content-related offenses.There is also an overemphasis on the significance of bypassing ro-bots.txt,raising suspicions of the misuse of data-related crimes.To address these issues,two primary regulatory ap-proaches have emerged in theory and practice.The first involves delineating web crawler boundaries based on robots.txt,while the second relies on the principle of assessing the web crawlers,known as the principle of interest evaluation,to determine their behavioral boundaries.However,the contractual nature of rorbots.txt encounters normative and juris-prudential obstacles in civil law and lacks convincing theoretical foundations.Additionally,the principle of interest eval-uation fails to provide stable standards for evaluating data-related crimes and civil law,essentially avoiding the delinea-tion of boundaries for web crawler behavior.Therefore,it is necessary to implement preceding administrative regulation due to its ability to offer effective guidance for delineating web crawler boundaries across various legal domains and har-monizing civil and criminal judgments.Preceding regulatory oversight does not signify a return to rigid,one-size-fits-all standards.Instead,it involves case-by-case administrative confirmation of web data crawling behavior.In terms of specific measures,it should involve processes such as"special certification for robots.txt"and"special authorization for anti-web crawling measures",with the inclusion of appeal rights for all parties involved.In the judicial realm,the ef-fectiveness of regulatory standards should be presumed,thereby standardizing industry practices and legitimizing and lim-iting the functions of robots.txt.This would provide clear guidance for judicial authorities.
web crawlerjudicial regulationpreceding regulatory oversightadministrative regulation of web crawlers
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