Insights
The Law pages say what an instrument requires and News says what happened to it this week. These are the longer pieces: how a rule came to exist, what it does and does not reach, and what a team building software can do about it.
Every article is drafted with AI assistance from the LexLint software-law corpus and written and edited by the person or team on its byline. Each carries its byline, its review status, the date its law was last checked, and a note on how it was made. Where an attorney has reviewed a piece for legal accuracy, it says so by name and date; an article that has not yet been reviewed says that instead. They are research summaries, not legal advice, and reading one is not a substitute for counsel in the jurisdiction you operate in.
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Insight 01 Disallow: / - what a website can actually forbid
Thirty years of asking crawlers to behave, and the three routes by which a request that binds nobody can start to bind someone.
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Insight 02 403 Forbidden · which barriers the law will actually defend
Computer-misuse statutes want a wall, and a request is not one. Where the line sits in four jurisdictions, and the July 2026 ruling that put a rung on the ladder.
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Insight 03 By continuing, you agree · when terms of use bind a crawler
A crawler never reads, clicks or assents to anything, and terms still decide more scraping cases than any statute. How the contract forms, and the two places it cannot reach.
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Insight 04 Eight ways to say no to bots · and no winner yet
Say nothing and EU law treats your pages as fair game for AI training. Saying no only counts if a machine can read it, the regulator has not yet said which formats count, and the answer meanwhile is to publish more than one.
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Insight 05 There is no robots.txt for people · personal data in a scraped corpus
The lawn is public and the dog walkers are not. A page can be lawfully crawled, lawfully mined, and still unlawful to process, and copyright law has nothing to say about it.
The robot in the pictures above is LEM, a fictional character who stands in for the UnGovr crawler in every illustration on this site. The situations LEM is drawn into are ones we have met ourselves, in web crawling, data management and content publishing, and each article says which.