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No Commercial Use

because personal websites are for personal use


If You’re Using a Bot or Scraper

Your bot/scraper is returning this page instead of the page you tried to access because the operator of the website you’re trying to crawl considers your bot/scraper to be a commercial use of their website to which they did not consent. Since you chose to ignore robots.txt the operator has resorted to more stringent measures.

If You Operate a Personal Website

The law may not adequately safeguard your right to be acknowledged as an author and compensated for commercial use of your work, but that does not mean you are obligated to accept unwanted commercial traffic. If you have access to your web server configuration, you have the right to block unwanted user agents to reduce commercial crawling and scraping. You likewise have the right to attempt to reject traffic from commercial referrers.

If you agree with the sentiments expressed on this website, you may redirect unwelcome commercial traffic to nocommercialuse.org.

If you are unfamiliar with this process of rejecting unwanted traffic at the server level, the following examples may prove useful.

Simplified Examples For Apache Sites

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (BadBot) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (WorseBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* https://nocommercialuse.org/ [L]
redirecting traffic unwanted user agents to nocommercialuse.org
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (corporate\.social) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} (nazi\.bar) [NC]
RewriteRule .* https://nocommercialuse.org/ [L]
redirecting traffic from unwanted referrers to nocommercialuse.org

Simplified Examples For Nginx Sites

if ($http_user_agent ~* (BadBot|WorseBot)) {
    proxy_pass https://nocommercialuse.org/
}
redirecting traffic unwanted user agents to nocommercialuse.org
if ($http_referer ~* (corporate\.social|nazi\.bar)) {
    proxy_pass https://nocommercialuse.org/
}
redirecting traffic from unwanted referrers to nocommercialuse.org

If You Work in Tech

If you work for a search engine, social media platform, or a generative AI company and you’re visiting this website for any reason, the work you do and the world you’re helping to build is the reason this site exists. Your business depends on not having to ask permission, and on being able to presume consent for commercial use of personal websites for no other reason than that they are accessible on the internet.

US and international copyright law may even permit this at the moment, but that does not mean that personal website operators are legally or ethically obligated to cooperate with you. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.

We do not consent to commercial use of our websites, we never have, and if you had bothered to try to get informed consent first instead of doing as you pleased and then asking forgiveness afterward you might not have provoked our ire. You might instead have found yourselves facing a demand for proper compensation and attribution, but that is merely an indication that we are not entirely unreasonable and thus willing to negotiate a mutually beneficial arrangement.

If you think that opt out is acceptable and that persuading people to opt in is onerous or inconvenient, then I pity the women in your lives. I doubt you have any greater regard for their rights than you do for those of personal website operators. Your careerism makes you complicit, and when those who survive us ask “Who killed the world?” their storytellers will rightly blame you.

If this offends any of you because you don’t want to see yourselves as nothing more than little Eichmanns, then stop being part of the problem. Unionize and resist unethical uses of your skills. You are the means of production. Your work makes your bosses’ profits possible. Without you, they are nothing.


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