Software robot

A software robot (also called a "bot" or "spider") is “a computer program which operates across the Internet to perform searching, copying and retrieving functions on the web sites of others.” It "is capable of executing thousands of instructions per minute, far in excess of what a human can accomplish. Robots consume the processing and storage resources of a system, making that portion of the system’s capacity unavailable to the system owner or other users. Consumption of sufficient system resources will slow the processing of the overall system and can overload the system such that it will malfunction or ‘crash.’ A severe malfunction can cause a loss of data and an interruption in services.” Id. at 1060 n.2 (citations omitted).