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The Wayback Machine, Friend or Foe?
ShaunC asks: "As the webmaster of numerous sites, I'm curious how others feel about the Wayback Machine. What particularly interests me is the fact that the Machine is a relatively new animal, yet it contains snapshots from my sites dating back to 1998. I can't help but wonder: where did they get such old copies of my websites, and who gave them permission to make those copies? I certainly didn't provide either. Perhaps I'm too much of a purist, but I've always seen the internet as an ever-changing medium, not a permanent one. Archives have bothered me ever since the fledgling days of DejaNews." This site last made an appearance on Slashdot, earlier this year. Internet archival sites are right smack in the crosshairs
of copyright, but they are useful. Anyone who has ever used Google's cache (and there are plenty of those links on Slashdot) can attest to this. Of course, the issue that may bug many content providers is how to opt-out of such services, since some see it as a copyright violation. Is it possible to balance the issues of copyright and history, or will these two Internet resources find themselves in legal trouble in the future?
"The way I see it, archives are much like SPAM; I never opted in, why should it be my responsibility to opt out? I manage a number of domains and the process of refining robots.txt files and submitting myself to the Wayback Machine for removal seems to be intrusive. Worse, domains I've abandoned (which have lapsed or been re-registered by someone else) are forever archived in the Machine and I have no way to exclude them. Why should I have to deliberately remove my copyrighted material from an archive which was never granted permission to replicate that material in the first place?"
Sherman: Mr. Peabody, I want to go back in time!
.... Damn it, boy, fire up the Wayback machine. And fetch me my chew toy.
Mr. Peabody: Be quite, Sherman. This new Wayback Machine is now accessable via a browser. Be happy with that.
Sherman: But I wanted to go back in time and watch Cleopatra taking one of those milk baths again.
Mr. Peabody:
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I browsed your all of your sites (even the abandoned ones) and since my browser cache is set to 782TB (and I'm still running Netscape 1.0N), your sites are still there. And my cache is publically accessible via my webserver. Yet another way you're being violated. Ah, the risks and perils of publishing on a public network.
I was talking to this guy who works for a web hosting company, and he says a fourth of his sales calls are people calling him up cause they're pissed that their last hosting company 'lost' thier site. (in reality most the time its later found out that the guy deleted it himself or renamed index.html to index2.html, etc..) He says 90% of the sites he can find a copy on the wayback machine. He'll then start to quote the website's contents to the guy on the phone and usually will have the amazed (and dumbfounded) customer signing a hosting contract by the end of day.
Clearly an RFC is needed here:
"Retro-Temporal Automated User Agent Exclusion Protocol"
I'll try to put a draft together by April 1.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Anyone else find it mildly disturbing that 1998 is considered to be distant history?
I stole this Sig
It's so funny that I've been sending around links to my friends of their old corporate websites for months now. Totally freaks them out.
On a different note, how long until the wayback machine is used as evidence in court?
"No, Your Honor, we never posted slanderous comments about XYZ Company. *Oh CRAP! Not the Wayback Machine?!?*
Well, the default is to not plug your server into the Internet the first place, now isn't it? To quote Doug from Ghost World, "It's America, dude, learn the rules."
Seriously, if someone's precious intellectual property - as if anything worthwhile was ever posted on the Internet in the first place - becomes compromised because they don't know a basic principle of how to run a website, well then boo hoo.
It's worth the tradeoff. That the Wayback Machine exists is seriously cool, and some day will be of definite historical worth. If the occasional Brady Bunch erotic slash fiction author has to take a ride on the waaahmbulance because "A Very Brady Gangbang (M/m/F/f nc b/d)" got copied without their permission for the greater historical good, then that's a price worth paying.
transaction companies decide to integrate
their historical transaction databases.
That way, when this game is over, we get all of our money back.
?sp