Court threw out trespass claim, stating It is hard to see how entering a publicly available web site could be called a trespass, since all are invited to enter. Ebay s user agreement prohibits the use of any robot, spider, or other automatic device to monitor or copy its web site or its content. A robot or spider or web crawler is a computer program that operates across the Internet to perform searching, copying, and retrieving functions. Robots consume the processing and storage resources of a system, and can potentially lead to a crash. Ebay uses robots.txt file to communicate its refusal to allow robotic activity on its site.
Rude robots ignore such files.
Ebay and BE were in negotiations as to whether and how BE could search Ebay s site. And, Ebay argues, if other auction aggregators like BE were allowed to do what BE is doing, this would cause severe harm to its system. They ve licensed others. Well, this type of use is expressly not licensed.