I, For One, Welcome Our Forthcoming New robots.txt Overlords

Despite my week-long Twitter consumption sabbatical (helped -- in part -- by the nigh week-long internet and power outage here in Maine), I still catch useful snippets from folks. My cow-orker @dabdine shunted a tweet by @terrencehart into a Slack channel this morning, and said tweet contained a link to this little gem. Said gem is the text of a very recent ruling from a District Court in Texas and deals with a favourite subject of mine: robots.txt. The background of the case is that there were two parties who both ran websites for oil and gas professionals that include job postings. One party filed a lawsuit against the other asserting that the they hacked into their system and accessed and used various information in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Stored Wire and Electronic Communications and Transactional Records Access Act (SWECTRA), the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (THACA), the Texas Theft Liability Act (TTLA), and the Texas Uniform Trade Secrets Act (TUTS).