hunter walk

The law is silent on whether content owners should or should not make their content freely available - Carter Rabasa from iPhone

(IANAL) To my knowledge, terms of service cannot revoke fair use rights, protected uses such as reverse engineering for interoperability, etc. They can write anything they want in the terms, but that doesn't make it enforceable. Just like you can sign a contract requiring you to do something illegal, but it won't be enforceable either. I assume this is one of the reasons TOS always include a clause that states that the entire agreement is not voided when an individual clause is deemed unenforceable. - Joel Webber

Joel, the enforcement doesn't come from government (the law), it comes from the content owner. A content owner can provide access (or deny) access to whoever they like, for whatever reasons they choose. Anyone (user, web crawler, 3rd party service, etc) that doesn't abide by the content owner's terms can lose access to the content. - Carter Rabasa

@Carter: Sure, the law doesn't stop content owners from using technical measures to control access. I doubt Google or anyone else is going to start ignoring robots.txt, and they could do more if they thought it necessary. I was just responding to Kevin's question about terms of use. - Joel Webber

Fair use isn't actually a written law (it isn't codified anywhere but in case law), but rather a defense you can use when charged with copyright infringement. Unfortunately this defense wasn't sufficient to prevent the Google Books fiasco (which IMHO should have been legal) or the MP3.com lawsuit. Copyright is seriously messed up on this planet. Of course, IANAL. :) - Matt Mastracci

Actually, while it wasn't originally written into copyright law in the US, it was formally adopted as part of the 1976 copyright act (not sure about Canada -- according to WIkipedia, most common law countries have something similar). But you're still right that it's a giant mess, because you can't get a finding of fair use until someone actually sues you. Which sucks. - Joel Webber