Is there a law requiring me to read and accept TOS or robots.txt before opening a website? What is the legal status of those? What if TOS says "you owe us $100 for every byte included in this TOS"? What if I have my own TOS about opening their links where they owe me $100 per byte sent?
No. TOS is not mutually binding agreement. You can't invite people to your garage sales and tell people that by looking at the items they've made a final sale automatically without their consent.
The fact that it does (or, at least, has been interpreted to) criminalize TOS violations is one of the must important flaws in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Aaron Swartz was a weird one. Some zealous IT guy exaggerated it as if national security data were being scraped when in fact most were just shoddy research papers written at 1 AM before the due date.
All people that landed a hand in this man's death should be charged with manslaughter.
Truly a shame and how draconian laws end up killing the innocent in the United States.
