I don’t think we’re There Yet. Once we build machines that can seek out and acquire the resources necessary for their own growth/healing/reproduction, whose rights are worth fighting for, it’ll be easier to make that case.

Anyways, that wouldn’t help here. No machines’ rights are being infringed by preventing you from scraping the web. If said self-reproducing machines were denied access to websites on the grounds that it would be considered “scraping”, I’d be at the front of the march to legislate against that kind of discriminatory behavior; but that’s not what we have here.

I do think that, given the obvious potential for both value and harm in scraping, it might make sense to provide licenses for demonstrably non-harmful scrapers.

I think the same think privileged people though about other when created divides. Are you really trying to make a case for discrimination to continue? I wonder what robots of the future would have thought about that comment.

> Am I the only one...

Yes, because you’re comparing racism and slavery to not being able to use your computer to scrape data from websites.

Edit: don’t ask for opinions if you can’t handle some of them.

I am comparing denial of right s on the basis of characteristic that subject can't change.

This is so myopic that I’m going to start a “sh%t HN says” Tumblr and make it the first post.

It's been done [1].

Yes it's an awful comment but it's one person, and it's been downvoted and flagged to death, which also says something about what "HN says".

[1] https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says