Not sure what "digital rights" that "manages"? I don't see it as an unreasonable suggestion that the tool shouldn't be set up out of the box to DoS sites it's scraping, that doesn't prevent anyone who is technical enough to know what they're doing to fork it and remove whatever limits are there by default? I can't see it as a "my computer should do what I want!" issue, if you don't like how this package works, change it or use another?
Indeed DRM is a very different thing from adhering to standards like `robots.txt` as a default out of the box (there could still be a documented option to ignore it).
He was using DRM as a metaphor for restricted software.
And advocating that software should do whatever the user wants.
If the user is ignorant about the harm the software does, then adding robots.txt support is win-win for all.
But if the user doesn't want it, then it's political, in the same way that DRM is political and anti-user.
This is software telling you what you are allowed to do based on what the software developer wants* (assuming the developers cares of course...). Which is how all software works. I would not want my users of my software doing anything malicious with it, so I would not give them the option.
If I create an open-source messaging app I am also not going to give users the option of clicking a button to spam recipients with dick pics. Even if it was dead-simple for a determined user to add code for this dick pic button themselves.
Who told you about DRM? It is an open source tool.
Simply requiring a code change and a rebuild is enough of a barrier to prevent rude behavior from most people. You won't stop competent malicious actors but you can at least encourage good behavior.
If popular, someone will make a fork but having the original refuse to do stuff that are deemed abusive sends a message.
It is like for the Flipper Zero. The original version does not let you access frequency bands that are illegal in some countries, and anything involving jamming is highly frowned upon. Of course, there are forks that let you do these things, but the simple fact that you need to go out of your way to find these should tell you it is not a good idea.
I feel like you may have a misunderstanding of what DRM is. Talking about DRM outside the context of media distribution doesn't really make any sense.
Yes, someone can fork this and modify it however they want. They can already do the same with curl, Firefox, Chromium, etc. The point is that this is project is deliberately advertising itself as an AI-friendly web scraper. If successful, lots of people who don't know any better are going to download it and deploy it without a full understanding (and possibly caring) of the consequences on the open web. And as I already point out, this is not hypothetical, it is already happening. Right now. As we speak.
Do you want cloudflare everywhere? This is how you get cloudflare everywhere.
My plea for the dev is that they choose to take the high road and put web-server-friendly SANE DEFAULTS in place to curb the bulk of abusive web scraping behavior to lessen the number of gray hairs it causes web admins like myself. That is all.
It's exactly DRM, management of legal access to digital content. The "media" part has been optional for decades.
The comment they replied to didn't suggest sane defaults, but DRM. Here's the quote, no defaults work that way (inability to override):
> At a _bare_ minimum, that means obeying robot.txt and NOT crawling a site that doesn't want to be crawled. And there should not be an option to override that.
I'll also add something that I expect to be somewhat controversial, given earlier conversations on HN[0]: I see contexts in which it would be perfectly valid to use this and ignore robots.txt.
If I were directing some LLM agent to specifically access a site on my behalf, and get a usable digest of that information to answer questions, or whever, that use of the headless browser is not a spider, it's a user agent. Just an unusual one.
The amount of traffic generated is consistent with browsing, not scraping. So no, I don't think building in a mandatory robots.txt respecter is a reasonable ask. Someone who wants to deploy it at scale while ignoring robots.txt is just going to disable that, and it causes problems for legitimate use cases where the headless browser is not a robot in any reasonable or normal interpretation of the term.
[0]: I don't entirely understand why this is controversial, but it was.
Software I installed on my computer needs to the what I want as the user. I don't want every random thing I install to come with DRM.
The project looks useful, and if it ends up getting popular I imagine someone would make a DRM-free version anyway.