Are advertisers owed compensation for non-humans wasting their ad exposures?

If you're a site owner and you're using bots to screw over your advertisers, that's one thing.

But otherwise, what's their claim here? I'm sure web crawlers interact with ads all the time in the course of their crawling, and no one's complaining about that.

To the contrary, advertisers complain about it constantly. But they're only one piece of the ad industry, and everyone else in the industry is okay with it, if only because its another methods of auditing the advertisers.

Commit click and impression botnot fraud?

That's not a real, legal, thing. "Click fraud" is just what some businesses term interactions that they might not pay for.

There is no legal, or moral, requirement to only click links if there is some chance that you will increase the income of some "advertiser".

Click fraud would be actual fraud if the the clicks originate from the person getting paid for the advertising. When an unrelated third-party does it, though, it is not.

That is a great response and true. What these researchers are proposing does not match the usual meaning of click fraud.

Though the harms it causes are similar:

* advertiser is paying for clicks/impressions from a bot rather than a user

* publisher/network sending lower quality traffic to advertiser faces reputation and financial risk

Likewise, depending on the situation fake social media profiles also can harm the quality of said network.

In terms of damages caused by the researchers' action... clicks would be the most harmful. Especially against insurance, loans, and mortgages which they seem to be interested in. Those have some of the highest CPCs around. (e.g. http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords)

Isn't that what most click fraud is, though? Paying someone/something to click your own ads? Who would do click fraud if they aren't somehow being compensated by the ad provider?

"Unrelated third party" is presumably a party that is not being paid by the beneficiary of ad revenue.

Right. But my question is... why would an unrelated third party engage in click fraud? All I can think of is some kind of framing, in an attempt to get a site owner delisted or sued.

While advertisers could maybe possibly sum up a silly damages claim against the professors, this isn't really what it's about. The researchers aren't asking to be indemnified against damages claims -- they don't fear the ad networks/advertisers. Their fear is that the government would prosecute them with a crime for their research.

Personally I think it's a little unlikely, but criminal prosecution can all be very capricious and dependent on local and regional priorities. And so much the better that their suit against the US might bring about limits of CFAA via precedent.

They have a strong argument along the lines of copyright fair use for academic purposes.

If I properly quote Wm Shakespeare “You speak an infinite deal of nothing.” (Merchant of Venice) then within various limitations designed for academic quotation use, I don't owe ole bill a penny nor do I need a copyright license for that academic purpose quotation.

On the other hand if I were a musician and sampled 2 seconds of a song, supposedly I need a legal release or the owner of the sampled song will have our government give me the economic death penalty in the courts.

The CFAA is kinda weird legally having the infinitely powerful government team up with the infinitely powerful megacorporations just to make sure individuals follow arbitrary corporate defined local rules of behavior. I'm having trouble finding a non-CFAA example in the real world. I guess it would be like if a shopping mall privately published a rule about not saying "merry christmas" for inclusiveness reasons, then the local police shoot in the head any private citizen at the mall caught saying "merry christmas".

>They have a strong argument along the lines of copyright fair use for academic purposes.

Next thing you know they'll be running extension cords over your fence and into your windows in order to power their experiments for academic purposes.

Click fraud is not a crime.