I know bringing things from the real world into the digital realm often results in badly overstretched metaphors. Allow me this one; are your belongings really yours if you forget to lock the door?

It's not about ownership, it's about privacy. Yes, people are allowed to look at your stuff if you leave it in a public place.

Edit: it's even stronger in this case, because it's your own equipment that is providing the data to anyone who asks politely (using industry-standard requests and no impersonation or other fraud).

But is your living room a public place, if you leave your front door open? I don't think so.

But you're not in the living room. You asked for the data politely and the server sent the data to you. It even put your address on it to deliver it over the public internet.

> Allow me this one; are your belongings really yours if you forget to lock the door?

Practically, it depends on where you live. In major urban areas: no they're gone and they probably aren't coming back. Insurance might replace some of them.

In the sticks? Most people don't lock their doors, even if they shut them.

> I know bringing things from the real world into the digital realm often results in badly overstretched metaphors.

Except this metaphor is already stretched beyond breaking. An index isn't even a copy.

Copying a set of publicly available read-only files is not theft (you still have your copy I haven't deprived you of it).

But we're not even talking about copying your files, just the names you've assigned to them. And in his proposed form, even allowing you to remove the names from our index.

Pretty kind treatment for a copy that you've given me when I asked for it.

> forget to lock the door

oh god this again

Your belongings are really only yours to the extent that social contract (ie the law) defines them as such or you are able to prevent other people from taking them. Everything else is an illusion.

Yes. And trespassing is still trespassing even if I leave the front door open. Hacking is still hacking even if the computer is left unsecured.

Creating an index of these files seems more like driving down the street taking pictures of all the houses with their front doors left open. Something Google seems to get away with on a regular basis.

Trespassing is not a good example. Let's say your private home is (for some reason) in the middle of some downtown area, where every neighbor is a public shop (IE, the expectation is that everything is welcome to the public). Not only that, it's pretty much indistinguishable from the outside from all the other public shops around it. In this scenario, if you leave your door wide open in the middle of the day then no one would take your cries of trespassing seriously.

So no, I don't think trespassing is necessarily still trespassing, even if you leave the front door open. Like most things in life, it depends on context.

The expectation and the norm of this situation is that data published on public ports is for public consumption. You can't blame someone for accessing data that you put out there in a public manner, even unintentionally.

Oh I agree, context matters and courts would certainly take it into account. Police however might not.