"Non-consensually", as if you had to ask for permission to perform a GET request to an open HTTP server.
Yes, I know about weev. That was a travesty.
robots.txt is a polite request to please not scrape these pages because it's probably not going to be productive. It was never meant to be a binding agreement, otherwise there would be a stricter protocol around it.
It's kind of like leaving a note for the deliveryman saying please don't leave packages on the porch. It's fine for low stakes situations, but if package security is of utmost importance to you, you should arrange to get it certified or to pick it up at the delivery center. Likewise if enforcing a rule of no scraping is of utmost importance you need to require an API token or some other form of authentication before you serve the pages.
People who ignore polite requests are assholes, and we are well within our rights to complain about them.
I agree that "theft" is too strong (though I think you might be presenting a straw man there), but "abuse" can be perfectly apt: a crawler hammering a server, requesting the same pages over and over, absolutely is abuse.
> Likewise if enforcing a rule of no scraping is of utmost importance you need to require an API token or some other form of authentication before you serve the pages.
That's a shitty world that we shouldn't have to live in.
If you are building a new search engine and the robots.txt only include Google, are you an asshole indexing the information?
Whatever impact your new search engine or LLM might have in the world is irrelevant to their wishes.