Crawlers & automation
I. Scope and definitions
This notice applies to any programmatic, scripted, bulk, or high-frequency access to, scraping, indexing, caching, mirroring, or redistribution of this site’s resources, including but not limited to web crawlers, bots, harvesters, automated browsers, API clients, and technically equivalent means. Unless you have our express prior written authorization, you must comply with this notice and applicable laws and regulations.
II. Prohibited conduct
- Bulk capture, copying, storage, distribution, or commercial use of all or a material part of this site without authorization, including to train machine-learning models, build competing products, or republish on third-party sites.
- Circumventing, interfering with, or defeating reasonable technical measures such as authentication, rate limits, CAPTCHAs, session controls, and abuse-prevention policies.
- Spoofing or rotating User-Agent strings, abusing proxies or distributed nodes, splitting traffic to evade detection, or automating access to non-public areas such as signed-in content, member-only areas, or administration interfaces.
- Scraping or attempting to scrape other users’ account data, private messages, tokens, or personal details, or conducting credential stuffing, data exfiltration, directory traversal, or similar attacks.
- Imposing unreasonable load on this site or its infrastructure (e.g. extreme concurrency, long-lived connections that degrade service, or resource-exhaustion patterns) that harms stability or other users’ access.
III. Public content and legal boundaries
Publicly visible article titles, summaries, and body text remain protected by copyright and related rights; you may not use them in ways that violate this notice or the law. If we publish robots.txt, a sitemap, or other machine-readable rules, you must follow them as well; they may change at any time, and continued use after changes constitutes notice.
IV. License and written permission
Except where permitted by law (such as fair dealing or fair use, where applicable), any automated or bulk use beyond what a typical human visitor needs to read pages in a normal browser requires our prior written permission (including verifiable email), within agreed scope, rate limits, and purpose. Unauthorized scraping, redistribution, or derivative exploitation is not authorized, and we reserve all remedies.
V. Technical safeguards and enforcement
- We may throttle, block, ban IPs or ranges, suspend accounts, revoke sessions, or restrict interfaces based on traffic patterns, behavior signals, and risk controls, without prior individual notice where reasonable.
- We may log and retain technical data (such as IP address, timestamps, request paths, and User-Agent) for security audits, evidence, and cooperation with regulators or courts as required by law.
VI. Liability
Unlawful scraping, circumvention of technical measures, or unlawful processing of data may violate copyright, trade-secret, cybersecurity, data-protection, and personal-information laws, and may expose you to civil liability, administrative penalties, or criminal sanctions. You are solely responsible for losses caused to this site or third parties by your breach of this notice or applicable law.
If unlawful scraping or automation abuse by you, or by parties you direct or control, leads to information leakage, harm to our systems or operations, reputational damage, investigations or enforcement by regulators or courts, payments we make to users or third parties (including damages, compensation, or settlements), or reasonable costs to respond (such as attorneys’ fees, forensic or expert fees, notarial costs, notices, and compliance remediation), those losses and expenses shall be borne solely by the party responsible for the misconduct, and we may seek recovery from you under applicable law.
VII. Contact
If you operate a compliant search engine or need to coordinate crawling for academic or public-interest purposes, or if you believe you were blocked in error, please use our “Contact us” page or published email to describe your identity, purpose, and access pattern; we will respond within a reasonable time where practicable.