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Archiving Web Pages - Legal or Illegal?
Dyer asks: "I used to run several high-trafficked anonymous surfing sites and if I wasn't getting emailed by a lawyer telling me to block someone's site from being accessed I was being woken up at 2am with a telephone call from a crazy person yelling, sometimes swearing at me with the impression that my site copied theirs and it resided on my server, when in actuality it was being accessed by my server at that instant and being relayed to the user. This is my point, how do services like Archive.org and Google's cache get away with what they're doing? You can call their services whatever you like, but it doesn't change the fact that they are copying people's websites and saving them onto their servers for everyone to access."
Here's a thought, a rather complicated one, but I Think it just might do the trick...
DON'T POST THINGS YOU DON'T WANT PEOPLE TO SEE ON A PUBLIC NETWORK.
It's quite simple really.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
I'd be damn happy if someone made backups and mirrors of a site I made. People will visit my site without using bandwith I pay for. Also, if disaster strikes I can get my site back because someone else was kind enough to back me up. The more the merrier
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
No, but you do have a door. People are free to drive by your house and take a picture of it, or anything else out in public view. That reminds me of the girl that lost the lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild. If someone doesn't want their web page to be archived or cached, they can "put up a door" by using "robots.txt". If they really don't want to let the public at large see it, lock the door by protecting the content with a password. If they want to make absolutely sure no one sees it that they don't specifically show it to, they should save it as an HTML file on their personal computer and not even publish it on the web.
You don't properly understand the legal process.
In a copyright case, the courts first establish whether infringement has taken place, and this is determined irrespective of economic issues. It is determined purely on issues of subsistance, owernship, duration, etc - in terms of the statuory provisions and the existing case law. It is only then that exceptions (such as fair use, and specific exemptions - say - for public archives and libraries) are considered.
Then, finally, when remedies are considered (e.g. damages), the economic harm is taken into account. No damages may be awarded if there is no economic harm, but you still have the right to prevent the party from using an infringing copy of your work.
This is because copyright is a right on the work conferred to you. You can choose how you exercise that right, and that may include you refusing to allow others to use your work even in situations where it does no economic or moral harm to you (I mean, basically, you have the right and you can do damn well what you like with it!). There are of course some "essential facility" copyright cases where courts have ruled that an owner must license or allow use of a work, but these do not come along often (e.g. the macgill case in the EU).
You can argue that this is not a good way to do it, but the facts are that this is how it works now, and in terms of new technologies such as the Internet, it is not likely to chance immediately.
Paper can potentially last a long time (the US Constitution is still intact, for example). However, the average paper archive the size of a CD (which would physically be quite substantial) would require enough upkeep to make the cost of storing and maintaining it much greater than the cost of burning a new copy of the CD every ten or twenty years.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.