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They're just piling on anything they can regardless of reason. A real damage count would be lost sales due to web scraping, but they don't sell anything.

> For example, the organization spent $1,548,693 on upgrades for its hardware infrastructure, and an additional $608,069 for a two-year Cloudflare contract [..] Other costs include the salaries of 34 full-time employees, who were tasked with mitigating the harm caused by the attacks, as well as various other investigation, security, and hardware-related costs.

> “OCLC has incurred damages of $5,333,064 as a direct result of Anna’s Archive’s cyberattacks, but that amount does not fully compensate OCLC for the harm from Anna’s Archive’s wrongful actions. OCLC continues to suffer from harms that cannot be remedied by monetary damages.”

Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack? Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL.



> Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack? Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL.

We've been tobagonning down the slippery slope of "cyber" damages for a long time now.


Dang, surely this will put an end to AI training by scraping the web! Unless... perhaps such standard might not get evenly applied?



The original "damages" in a lawsuit are almost always made up. They're supposed to get adjusted downward during and after the lawsuit.

This is also why having a default judgement delivered against you for failing to show up generally isn't great.


They haven't even named a defendant except for some random archivist [0] they have no evidence against. I get suing John Doe for discovery and injunction purposes but how can they even be awarded damages - no show or not - without identifying the defendant.

[0]


You forgot to add a link about the accused archivist, here's an article[0] about her denial of any connection to the group. (One of their arguments is that she has a github account named "anarchivist", which is a pretty sick name)

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/key-defendant-in-annas-archive-laws...


They're going to be adjusted down to zero


Does OCLC get revenue from advertising or anything like that? I always notice they have google beacons on their site.


They don't, OCLC is largely funded by the exorbitant prices they charge libraries for various things, including DDC.


>> and an additional $608,069 for a two-year Cloudflare contract

> Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL.

On the paid plans, I think Cloudflare charges for bandwidth. Also, you still need to pay for bandwidth from the origin to Cloudflare. And if it's scraping, it's likely to be a lot of cache misses that need to go to the origin.

> Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack?

I've run sites that attract scraping... Aggressive scapers can effectively DoS a server; and if they're trying to get around rate limits, that can look like a DDoS.


Ask Aaron Swartz


[flagged]


Some friends and family are likely to be on HN, and I'd assume probably don't want to see speculation like that.


What makes people go whight-knighting for merely perceived wishes? And that's before even thinking why those wishis should trump other's wish to discuss this on a public forum.


The conspiracy/speculation on every damn topic around here is getting out of hand.


There's been a very noticeable decline in average comment quality since Reddit started pulling its API nonsense. It was worse right after it happened, and it's clear that the mods are working hard to keep it under control, but the Reddit exodus definitely has had an impact here.


I think this is a far deeper issue in our society given that you see unhinged conspiracy shit absolutely everywhere on the internet now. It’s just continued outgrowths of QAnon, slowly pulling in more and more people who think they’re too smart to get dragged into something like that.




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