As I observe elsewhere, all I'm saying is that there's a qualitative difference, not that the qualitative difference implies illegality. Are you going to defend the proposition that there is no legal, moral, or philosophical distinction that can be made between Google and a guy downloading a web page once by hand?

Also, I've long been of the opinion that if we had somehow gotten to today with no search engines, and Google tried to start up today, that they would be slammed to the ground by lawsuits, which they would probably lose. I consider this a criticism of the law, not the search engines.

>. Are you going to defend the proposition that there is no legal, moral, or philosophical distinction that can be made between Google and a guy downloading a web page once by hand?

I'm not a lawyer so I can't speak directly to "legally" but I believe there shouldn't be a legal difference between a search engine loading a page and me doing it by hand. After all, how would I hand verify what my search engine is saying if doing so might be illegal?

>Also, I've long been of the opinion that if we had somehow gotten to today with no search engines, and Google tried to start up today, that they would be slammed to the ground by lawsuits, which they would probably lose. I consider this a criticism of the law, not the search engines.

You could be right and I would agree the law today is horribly screwed up.

No, not "Google pulling one page"... Google. The whole thing. We've been talking about the difference between grabbing one page and grabbing thousands+ of pages all along... are you reading what I'm actually saying or just knee-jerking here?

> Also, I've long been of the opinion that if we had somehow gotten to today with no search engines, and Google tried to start up today, that they would be slammed to the ground by lawsuits, which they would probably lose.

What exactly has changed in the law in the 15 years since Google started up? The CFAA is almost 30 years old...