Please review HiQ vs. LinkedIn - it hinged on the fact that HiQ hired crowdsourced workers (“turkers”) to create fake profiles through which to access LinkedIn’s platform (who had to agree to the ToS to create these accounts). The court found that hiQ expressly agreed to the user agreement when it created its corporate account on LinkedIn’s platform.
This doesn't apply if you don't ever agree to anything - which is the case if the information is not locked behind account creation.
> it is considered theft-of-service if you bypass the posted site usage terms
My understanding is that this is not accurate.
HiQ v LinkedIn established that this is only the case if you actually agreed to the terms of service. Such "agreement" only happens if the information is walled behind an account creation process, e.g. Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. If it's just scraping publicly available webpages, the only legal issue with scraping would be unreasonably or obviously negligent scraping practices which lead to degradation or denial-of-service. And obviously the line for that would have to be determined in civil court.
eBay v. Bidder's Edge (2000) is the last case that I could find which even considered violation of robots.txt as very minor part of the judgement, but the findings were based far more on other things. Intel Corp. v. Hamidi also implicitly overruled the judgement in that that ruling (though not related to robots.txt, which was really just a very minor point in the first place).
Robots.txt doesnt create a legal obligation. It’s just a set of rules saying “if you don’t follow these rules to politely crawl our site, we’ll block you from crawling our site”.
Obviously “anything goes” in civil suits however - if someone is being absurdly egregious with their crawling there’s usually some exposure to one tort or another.
Bank: "No, you see it was your identity that they stole!"
Customer: "Well I don't know because I seem to have my identity whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of dollars. I'm not clear why you think it's my identity that was stolen rather than your money."
When you say "as one of the signers" do you mean you signed the federal bill which modified this tax? i.e. you are a congressperson? Surely I'm misunderstanding you; your post history is utterly incompatible with any sitting congressperson. But I can't figure out what you meant by it.
Loan example doesn't work because it's not revenue used to buy the lathe. That type of loan situation is exactly what depreciation/amortization/MACRS is for. If the company brings in $500,000 but buys a $1,000,000 lathe with a loan, they have a net cash flow of +$500,000. Their NPV isn't immediately affected by the loan liability because it's offset by the positive value of the lathe asset.
Then they pay taxes on $357,100 of adjusted earnings because under a 7-year MACRS depreciation, it's assumed the lathe lost $142,900 of value in its first year of ownership (under double-declining or straight-line methods).
Your first part is accurate though.
Anyways, this tax law is fucking terrible. W2 Wages should not be capital expenses because you generally won't be using loans to pay them.
This doesn't apply if you don't ever agree to anything - which is the case if the information is not locked behind account creation.