>People never agreed DOSing a site to take copyright material was acceptable. Many people did not have a problem with taking copyright material in a respectful way that didn't kill the resource.
Has it be shown that perplexity engages in "DOSing"? I've heard of anecdotes of AI bots gone amuck, and maybe that's what's happening here, but cloudflare hasn't really shown that. All they did was set up a robots.txt and shown that perplexity bypassed it. There's probably archivers out there that's using youtube-dl to hit download from youtube at 1+Gbit/s, tens of times more than a typical viewer is downloading. Does that mean it's fair game to point to a random instance of someone using youtube-dl and characterizing that as "DOSing"?