alt Hacker News11 THOUSAND searches in one day? What's the problem?
If anything, libraries should be becoming more AI friendly, not less. Instead, we get this sort of bullshit from the ACM:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3832783.3834511
It's a canonical DOI on what was a download server. It says exactly which file is being requested. (I chose a random recent one.) At the very most, they should serve a static page with a bibtex entry, and a few other metadata fields, and a link to the PDF and whatever other formats are available.
Instead, we get piles of captchas, login-gate spam about how they're "open access" now and have some initiative to be LLM friendly.
Getting back to the problem of people doing stuff that requires access to library materials: What sort of server-side cost multiplier do you suppose this ACM page has vs. just serving a few S3-compatible URLs that point to a few mirrors? (Or, got forbid, Anna's Archive / libgen, since ACM is open access, and those sites would be doing nothing wrong by mirroring ACM content.)
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The problem is unintentional DOS due to traffic can constitute a felony under the CFAA; the case in question being Pulte Homes, Inc. v. Laborers' International Union 2011.
After Pulte fired an employee represented by the union, LIUNA urged members to call and send email to the company, expressing their opinions. As a result of the increased traffic, the company's email system crashed. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the LIUNA's instruction to call and email "intentionally caused damage," reversing the lower court's decision.
Now thankfully we have Sandvig v. Barr, 2020 where the DC Federal Court ruled that the CFAA does not criminalize the violation of a website's terms of service, but imo all bets are off in terms of interpretation of the law in the wild west of AI.
It's 11 THOUSAND searches ON JUST THAT ONE TOPIC in one day when they are used to seeing less than 11 THOUSAND searches in one day TOTAL. None of these systems were built for this type of traffic. The total traffic from these crawlers is many times more than just 11,000. It's more like 11,000 searches on 100,000 topics.