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The Internet Archive Sued Over Stored Pages
Kailash Nadh writes "The Internet archive, which has been storing snapshots of millions of webpages since 1996 has been sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, Philadelphia. The firm was defending Health Advocate, a company in suburban Philadelphia that helps patients resolve health care and insurance disputes, against a trademark action brought by a similarly named competitor. In preparing the case, representatives of Earley Follmer used the Wayback Machine to turn up old Web pages - some dating to 1999 - originally posted by the plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia. Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive, saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive's database, was unauthorized and illegal." CT:update note that the submittor got it backwards: Healthcare Advocates is the sueing Wayback and Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, not the other way around.
fsck me if i'm wrong, but wouldn't this be similar to suing someone for referencing an old book I wrote, just because I'd released a new one that didn't contain much of the old information?
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Did they set up their robots.txt file properly? If not, they may not have a case.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Better sue everyone who has visited the website in question but never purged their temporary internet files folder.
Would that make archived newspaper editorials, TV reports, etc. illegal as well? Google beware.
Looking forward to newspapers filing similar frivolous lawsuits against libraries for maintaining old copies of the papers in their collections; copies that newspaper company might be embarassed about now.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Could we at least get a writeup that doesn't contradict itself?
So who are they being sued by, the lawfirm or the plaintiff that the lawfirm was going up against?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If it was at one point online and available for anyone on the Internet to see, how is keeping a copy of it illegal? This will set an interesting precedence.
Music - www.richardmac.com
....why not just ask them to take them off?
Does that mean if I visited a website in '99, then turned off the computer and haved turned it back on, that I can be sued for having the page in cache? C'mon this is BS. The wayback even states they will remove and never archive again if you ask them too (think simple email). They even go so far as to not store the images. sheesh!
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Wouldnt this reference site be covered under some of the same protections as a library. It serves some of the very same purposes.
Hopefully this falls flat.
I wonder where the server are locations
Pablo
Lawsuits these days sound more like people whining like spoiled brats than someone really done an injustice.
They publish the thing, person X stores it, person Y uses stored info to prove they publish it. So what? If they'd written the thing in a newspaper they would sue someone for keeping the newspaper?
Huh
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Would a lawsuit be considered if instead of a cache of web pages, the other side had used old newspapers from the library or VHS recordings of an old television broadcast? Once they've put their web pages into the public, don't they lose control of who keeps a copy?
I'm not saying that legally they don't have a legitimate case, but is it really necessary to persue an organisation such as the Internet Archive over something so passive as this? In my opinion, hell no it isn't.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
The archive is being sued by Health Advocates, not the legal firm that had defended Health Advocates. In fact, the legal firm is named in the suit as well.
And to clarify: its not a simple "you have our stuff stored on your systems" claim. Rather, Health Advocates is claiming that the archive failed to follow the instructions in robots.txt that were intended to prevent access to historical material.
They got caught with their pants down and now are suing because someone kept the evidence. Boy do I hope this lawsuit meets a swift and decisive end in favor of the Internet Archives.
To be candid, I'm surprised it took this long for someone to sue them.
Maybe Healthcare assoc purchased the services of the law firm that sued them to sue themselves and their source of data?
You should pretty much expect it to live until, well, the end of the internet. Unless their website is some sort of copyrighted work, I don't think they have a leg to stand on.
K
So, they want to make their webpage freely available to the entire world, but they don't want people to download the pages? Make up your fucking mind, if you're going to put something on the internet, people are going to download it.
..on at least two dates in July 2003, the suit states, Web logs at Healthcare Advocates indicated that someone at Harding Earley, using the Wayback Machine, made hundreds of rapid-fire requests for the old versions of the Web site. In most cases, the robot.txt blocked the request. But in 92 instances, the suit states, it appears to have failed, allowing access to the archived pages.
For the "I don't wanna rtfa because its early" crowd.
There is a Wayback machine mirror in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It would be very difficult for them to find any legal basis in Egypt to get this one offline.
Assuming the judge has more than one brain cell then this case should take no more than 30 seconds and will be summarised in two sentences.
"You published information on a public medium. Case mismissed."
But then again this is America we're talking about.. home of the idiot lawsuit and lunatic judicial decisions so I don't hold out much hope for the triumph of reason...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Sometimes I use my brain.
When will I be sued for remembering old stories and telling it to others ?
Stella!
And they said zombies weren't real!
A century from now all profit will be gathered from suing one another about IP & copyright rights :)
-- Sig down
Man, that is all people do here in America, find ways to sue other people, just to get easy money. Its no longer about the hard work and gratification of making something, its all about the money.
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Oh dear, did somebody use their old archived pages in a successful case against them?
I think that people such as this should not be allowed to have Websites if they don't want their pages accessed.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
In this case the plaintiff probably has a leg to stand on, perhaps unfortunately.
Publishing something on a web site does not authorize anybody to make a copy for later redistribution. The internet archive is in some kind of grey area here.
For those who wonder, of course a web page is by default copyrighted work.
However the public archive is performing a public service here, and is not for profit, so the decent and civilised thing to do would be to politely ask for the IA to take down the offending pages.
An ongoing archive of the internet - pfffft what do we need that for? Thank god people are allowed to try to sue such abhorrent projects into the ground.
Seriously though, there is a reasonable point here, in that they are redistributing copyrighted material without a license. It's about time people started thinking of a way to compromise between such archiving of history and the rights of the authors.
Archive.org obviously still have (or at least should) to access and store copyrighted information that is openly available. What we need is an incredidly easy to use and scalable (the net ain't small,folks) opt-in system. Such a system must:
-Be worded, and legally backed up, in a way that makes it impossible to opt out later.
-Be beyond reasonable doubt that such authorisation comes form the originator of the material.
-have the billions of free blog/lj/etc sites have everyone sign up to it when creating their site/blog purely to shrink the work required by 1000x
But if push comes to shove, I vote for the right to archive the history of the internet over copyright any day of the week.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A book is a physical object, you can reference a book as long as you do not republish it in its entirety. The internet isn't a physical object, it's a collection of bytes arranged in a specific manner. It's that collection that makes it simple to take someone elses work and republish it, almost effortlessly.
The law has the ugly job of sorting out what constitutes copyright infringement -- republishing a website, perhaps? With the internet, it has become infinitely easier to republish works in their entirety, and hence the lawsuit. If they are guilty of anything, it is not of just 'referencing' a work, it is of taking that work, and republishing it without the authorization of its author. (heh, gotta love the wordplay)
To bring all of this to a point, it's as if I took your old book, put it into a book that talks about old stuff, and recopied everything, verbatim.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Does that mean if I visited a website in '99, then turned off the computer and haved turned it back on, that I can be sued for having the page in cache?
That is a bad analogy: your switched-off machine is not redistributing content and you are not providing an advertised service. Fair comment on the Wayback removal policy, though.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Seriously, if you don't want something to see something, THEN WHY DID YOU PUT IT ON THE INTERNET TO BEGIN WITH???
;)
but no worries, its all cool cause we just found an excuse to pull the lever on the american justice jackpot
Sounds like a copyright violation to me.
And the knowledge that they fear is a weapon to be used against them...
This is a case where a plaintiff of an action (that they probably lost) is sueing opposing council for using the internet archive looking for old documentation that is used as evidence against its claims. In effect, they're claiming that because they had a robots.txt any page that might have been on the internet archive was there illegaly, and shouldn't have been used as evidence.
In effect, they're saying "we were wrong, we tried to destroy the evidence of our wrongdoing, but because the shredder jammed and you found the evidence anyway, you're abusing our copyright".
The court hearing their argument should thoroughly smack them. Perhaps they should be brought to justice for trying to destroy evidence (or instructing a third party to do so), surely that's illegal in these post-Enron days.
Sorry, the writeup is bollocks. It says:
"The Internet archive, which has been storing snapshots of millions of webpages since 1996 has been sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, Philadelphia."
and also:
"Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive".
So to believe the write up, they are being sued by BOTH parties.
However, it says, in TFA:
"... John Earley, a member of the firm being sued, said he was not surprised by the action, because Healthcare Advocates had tried to amend similar charges to its original suit against Health Advocate, but the judge denied the motion. Mr. Earley called the action baseless, adding: "It's a rather strange one, too, because Wayback is used every day in trademark law. It's a common tool."
Christ knows where the idea they they are being sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey came from.
Doesn't anyone else read the stories first? o_O
There is a saying here in brazil that states: "Felt in the net, it's fish".
It means that once something happens, sorry, but people will not forgive or ignore it.
It just fits very well in this case, if you publish web pages on the net, you should not expect that nobody will copy them, you know, there is no DRM in html!
Plus, I bet those pages didn't had in each of them, or even anywhere, a copyright notice.
for hundreds of bad analogies.
Your question is answered in The Fine Article:
The suit contends, however, that representatives of Harding Earley should not have been able to view the old Healthcare Advocates Web pages - even though they now reside on the archive's servers - because the company, shortly after filing its suit against Health Advocate, had placed a text file on its own servers designed to tell the Wayback Machine to block public access to the historical versions of the site.
Under popular Web convention, such a file - known as robots.txt - dictates what parts of a site can be examined for indexing in search engines or storage in archives.
That is an excerpt; there is a bit more robots.txt related verbiage in the article.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
info@healthcareadvocates.com
Be gentle, they might be in the right after all.
In effect, they're claiming that because they had a robots.txt any page that might have been on the internet archive was there illegaly, and shouldn't have been used as evidence. I've always wondered why evidence that was illegaly brought up can't be used in court. It just makes no sense that murder weapon got illegally from the murderers house does not count as evidence. Of course, the illegal action must be punished, like in this case the possible copyright infringement. However, it should not limit the facts that it gives out.
?SYNTAX ERROR
Leaving the law to the lawyers, to me there are valid questions about such a thing as the internet archive. Do I want the crappy first try web pages I wrote popping back up ten or twelve -- or twenty for that matter -- years later to be viewed out of context?
Isn't it a bit like having your old yearbook pictures published from highschool? Sure, they were out there, but are they either relevant or helpful -- and do you have the [moral] right to control their distribution?
What about company information, product offerings, and political views? Old jokes? Times change, styles change. Politics change.
I believe its up to me to decide the longevity of content on publish on my own servers. I suppose its up to Commander Taco to determine the longevity of the content I create here.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Just because this is an electronic database doesn't mean there's inherently something illegal/immoral going on.
Your average Joe and local libraries hold newspapers from half a century ago. Most libraries even converted papers into microfische archives so they could be easily indexed and searched. They have been doing it for decades without such frivolous lawsuits.
How, in the name of Linus, is publishing anything on the internet for anyone to see different from disseminating information freely in a newspaper? Once news is out, it's in the public domain. End of story.
I am NOT putting my signature in this stupid little box! How do I know you won't steal my identity???
It is a right of copyright holder to decide which of his exclusive rights he would like to grant or share with others. This is what the entire premise of copyright is based on (and this is waht GNU is using in GPL too).
When an author creates a web site, it would be apparent by placing such site on the internet that a right to view it and interact with it has been granted. However, a right to COPY it clearly has not been (otherwise nobody would be able to put any proprietory images or texts without them being misappropriated). Someone storing the copy of this information and presenting it to others without express permission of copyright holder is violating the basic rights.
This is akin to an unauthorized book copying where a book would be copied in its entirety and offered to others. It is irrelevant whether money is being charged or not - just that the copy was not authorized by the author.
The example of quotation mentioned above misses the point. Quotation allows limited use of certain information from the source in another work, as long as it is properly identified. It is however NOT permitted to "quote" an entire book, adding perhaps a line above saying that "the following is a quote". Otherwise one might expect a full quotation of Harry Potter to appear in print in about a week and for half the price.
So, to sum up, unless Internet Archive or anyone else for that matter has express permission to copy and further display the ENTIRE work they may not do so. They may choose to display small informational quotes, about the size of information Google will display regarding each site.
It should be treated the same way trespassing for unfenced property is treated.
The case should be dismissed as it reproduces verbatim with attribution content that was published for public bot scraping.
Now what, will someone sue Yahoo ! or Google for caching pages or converting PDFs to HTML ? Or Coral Cache for unauthorized reproduction of websites ?.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Here's how I see it...
A website is like an advertising pamphlet or booklet, you use it to spread the good word about your products and services.
If you give me a pamphlet in 1998, it would stand to reason that I could use that same piece of paper in a case in 2005 against you if it proves a point I'm trying to make.
IA could be considered an infringer of IP and copyright if the pages they hosted were functionally complete and funneled traffic to them instead of to the original company, but they aren't, and they represent out of date versions of the website anyway. And google doesn't index IA instances of sites so the only way you could come across an archived version of a page is if you went to the IA specifically looking for it... so they also can't claim that it dilutes the value of their brand or confuses potential customers.
It's a constitutional guarantee, at least in the US.
The thinking runs that any wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence is outweighed by the wrongs that would result from abuses that would ensue if illegally obtained evidence was allowed to be used.
Healthcare Advocates is suing Health Advocates. When Health Advocates (Defense) and their lawyers (Defense) used the Wayback machine to try to prove the case frivolous, Healthcare Advocates (Plaintiff) tried to block their access to historical content (which does seem to make their case look dubious). However, the access was not successfully blocked, so the plaintiff is going after the Internet Archive and Health Advocate's(Defense) lawyers. Seems like more of a smoke wall than anything else.
No to IP.
Sounds like the advert just got in the way of my camera - to me.
The post says that "Internet archive ... been sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, Philadelphia", then says that "Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive". Are both sides sueing the IA?
http://www.lawcatalog.com/table_of_contents.cfm?pr oductID=1460&return=listview&CFID=1226232&CFTOKEN= 24010072
Maybe these people will get their heads screwed on straight if we can teach them to read.
... if they lose this fight.
For example, 2600 Magazine's old web site containing a copy of the DeCSS source code is stored in the Archive. Could the Archive be held in violation of the DMCA for mirroring someone else's old site?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
If you went to Groklaw's front page, you'd find an image indicating that you can give to Groklaw via Amazon. Therefore, you're just shilling for PayPal, as you don't like Amazon, or you've never actually visited Groklaw, and seen that you can donate another way.
""Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
The problem is that by allowing illegally obtained evidence, you are officially and legally endorsing criminal activity.
Who wins in a criminal vs criminal case? Would police officers be forced to fall on their own swords - ie commit criminal acts to gain evidence - on order of those above them? It also gives the thumbs up signal to vigilante justice too.
Oh, let's not also forget that it'd put the idea of court orders, seartch warrants, the right to be innocence until proven guilty (admittedly already fading), and a whole host of other rights in their graves.
There's just so much wrong with the idea of allowing illegal evidence, I'm surprised when anyone asks why it's wrong.
We tried to play Ministry of Truth and we would have got away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids at the Internet Archive. Let's sue!
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Didn't anyone ever tell you, law firms don't sue people, people sue people.
History is only what we'll permit you to know of it now.
The wayback, if I'm not mistaken, only stores PUBLIC PAGES. It wasn't 'illegal' for them to have them. It's used as a public service and a very cool project. These people are merely upset because something was found that they didn't WANT to be found, but it's their fault; they shouldn't have put it on a public page.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
So the robots.txt was added YEARS AFTER the site had been archived. I don't think they correctly used the "no-archive-time-travel" directive.
"We've lost our case based on evidence and will now be suing the organisation that provided the evidence for doing so".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
i want to know the answer to this as well.
First and foremost, the existance of a robots.txt does not constitute a contract between the client (a web surfer/browser agent) and the server (the site hosting the content proper). Repeat that over and over. There is nothing stating that the existance of robots.txt on your server must be requested by my crawler or spider.
Its preferred, but not required. Even so, I am free to ignore it if I want, and parse whatever links I see fit to grab. If you make the content public and I want to read that content, I'm going to get it, whether you have robots.txt in place or not.
Secondly, has anyone taken the time to validate the robots.txt file found on the site in question? Note too that they just changed robots.txt on July 8th of this year. Did the previous version validate? Are they trying to rewrite history again? What did the old version look like?
If there is even so much as one error, robots/crawlers are free to ignore/parse/merge/break it as they see fit. It happens all the time, and even when robots.txt is perfectly valid, many robots and crawlers ignore it anyway (msnbot and Yahoo's crawlers are two of the worst offenders here).
But back to the first point, robots.txt is a guideline, not a rule, not a contract, and certainly not something that can be enforced. Does lack of a robots.txt file constitute the legal right to publically redistribute the content? Or store it for later review and retrieval? How do you know any of your former employees from 1996 haven't stored your entire website on floppy, one page at a time? Did they adhere to robots.txt? Did ANYONE adhere to robots.txt in 1996? It seems that there was evaluation of the Robots Exclusion Standard in 1996, but was everyone using it? Not likely.
Microsoft Internet Explorer will certainly store the entire website for "reading offline" if you ask it to do so when bookmarking it. They don't parse robots.txt to exclude pages that shouldn't be stored locally.
Its too bad that people need to try to erase history to prevail in litigation. This isn't George Orwell's 1984... well, at least not yet anyway.
Leaving the law to the lawyers, to me there are valid questions about such a thing as the internet archive. Do I want the crappy first try web pages I wrote popping back up ten or twelve -- or twenty for that matter -- years later to be viewed out of context?
Well, if you don't think it's ready for public consumption, then don't make it available publicly until you feel comfortable with the content. Look at all the embarassing snippets you see of old TV stars on channels like VH1. If you put yourself in a public forum, don't expect people to magically forget your early attempts in the public arena.
Isn't it a bit like having your old yearbook pictures published from highschool? Sure, they were out there, but are they either relevant or helpful -- and do you have the [moral] right to control their distributi
Most yearbooks are available to the public. I can visit my highschool anyday and look at previous copies of my yearbook. Our local library even houses copies of yearbooks from the local schools. Not to mention, they have a copier in the school and library which is accessible for a small fee.
What about company information, product offerings, and political views? Old jokes? Times change, styles change. Politics change.
Ugh. Talk about censorship. How would you even enforce this? Many products made in the past now seem controversial in today's society. Take a look here:
Old Aunt Jemima Advertisement
Now how would we ever stop someone from saving that box for historical value? Perhaps we could go on a hunt for any old Aunt Jemima advertisements and burn them all!
It seems like every day I see worse and worse examples of human stupidity. And this from educated professionals! I weep for the future.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Feel free to voice your opinions to Healthcare Advocates Inc. info@healthcareadvocates.com
I'm reminded of all the tribal magic etc. that held that knowing someone's true name gave you power over them. Of course, that's terribly primitive; these days it's SSNs and CCNs that the black magicians are after.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
It's like 1984 book. History doesn't exists. They rewrite History permanently. You're not allowed to remember the past.
As Time Magazine frequently points out the "man (etc) of the year" is chosen because they are influential and important, not because they are good and worthy of laud. Why would Time Magazine be embarassed about this cover?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Luddites is the term used for anti-industrial people but there is no term known for anti-technological people AFAIK. :)
The best reply may be inserted into history...
Pixels keep you awake!
But on at least two dates in July 2003, the suit states, Web logs at Healthcare Advocates indicated that someone at Harding Earley, using the Wayback Machine, made hundreds of rapid-fire requests for the old versions of the Web site. In most cases, the robot.txt blocked the request. But in 92 instances, the suit states, it appears to have failed, allowing access to the archived pages.
In so doing, the suit claims, the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumventing of "technological measures" designed to protect copyrighted materials. The suit further contends that among other violations, the firm violated copyright by gathering, storing and transmitting the archived pages as part of the earlier trademark litigation.
Wow that is stretching things!! Ive never read the DMCA but to claim that a robots.txt file (which isnt a legally binding mechanism by any means) added to the site after the pages had been indexed had been ignored by the wayback machine was a circumvention of their copyright and a violation of that act...well Id fully expect any judge to have a good laugh at this.
HOWEVER given how poor the US legal system is I wouldnt be suprised to hear that robots.txt gains legal status as a binding document for crawlers!!
The information (web pages) was voluntarily placed into the public domain (by publishing it on the internet) by the company themselves. As such they surely have no recourse to limit its availability afterwards.
this whole "sue anything that moves" culture is really starting to piss me off.
Only just now? This has been going on a long time.
Sadly, lawyers are still held in high esteem by the masses, despite being the scum of the earth on this and in many other areas, such as patents. The US has been sinking into the stinking mire for several years now, led entirely by a legion of lawyers like something out of Mordor, and sadly other countries are following suit.
"We no longer stand on the shoulders of giants because we are crippled by midgets", applies here. Midgets with empty brains wielding pens.
bee-nest-stirring-stories, to see how hard you zzzzzz. Nice way to pick out those who still care, and put them on a list, because, those that don't care you don't have to worry about, in your quest for _ _ _ _ _ (fill in the blanks.)
I disagree. In North-Europe it's usual that even the illegally collected evidence counts. Abuse of power (police) is usually much more harsher a crime.
In Finland, there was one case where the police did an undercover operation to known drug seller. Too bad that at the time they didn't have rights to buy drugs undercover, resulting two officers charged and convicted of drug trading. Even more, the seller got an easier sentence because he was interpreted to be selling the drug out of request made by officers. Especially it was bad because it was planned. This in effect circumvents the "guilty man walking because of technicality" cases.
Besides, I see more problems with police violence in the US than I see problems with illegal evidence in the Europe. And no, I'm not trying to start a flame war.
?SYNTAX ERROR
whats next being sued for looking at a webpage??
Not many people would publish something hugely embarassing and then draw attention to it by suing a popular project.
Oh man, that sucks! I guess I better turn off all caching in my browser, lest I get sued for copyright infringement, because it's storing and rebroadcasting copyrighted materials that you may no longer want me to see at later date.
However, if you RTFA'd, you'd know that lots of IP law firms use the Wayback Machine on a daily basis, and in fact, the company suing the Internet Archive is not suing them for republishing copyrighted information. Rather, the case is that they recently placed a robots.txt file on their site that disallows viewing historical versions of the website, and the Archive is being sued because the Wayback Machine apparently ignored the robots.txt file (which, I might note is a voluntary standard, and by no means implies a contract between the two parties), which the plaintiff claims violates the DMCA. This has nothing to do with copyright violation.
It has everything to do with robots.txt. Read.
--- What
I've read about 500 analogies on what electronic information "is like".
Every analogy is bad. We cannot equate electronic information with physical information of ages past. Every analogy just plain sucks.
The reason the information age has taken off is because of the ease of transmitting, storing and copying of electronic data. These methods weren't available fifty years ago, and weren't wide spread until about twenty years ago. Trying to stuff these concepts into one-hundred plus year old ways of thinking is just useless.
This does not mean we can't use older solutions to problems to guide us in the future. But, we need to stop shackling ourselves to old ways of thinking. The fundamental way we transmit thoughts and ideas have changed, our fundamental way of thinking about information needs to change as well.
Does this mean "all information is free"? No. But trying to treat electronic information like a book is useless. Web sites are put out to be publicly consumed. It is contradictory to say that someone cannot cache it for non-profit purposes. Trying to reuse the "creative" parts of the web site for commercial purposes should be prohibited.
Bottom line: Stop with the analogies. Start thinking fresh.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Well I can't talk for mainland Europe, but here in the UK illegally obtained evidence is not permissable.
Although I disagree with a lot of our cruddy legal system, this I do agree with.
Aren't public libraries exempt from copyright laws? If that's also the case in the United States, perhaps archive.org can make a case for it.
<mini-rant> And I'm really sick and tired of people that have absolutely no regard for how the law works copying material off the Internet and then expecting never to get sued for it, claiming some legally naive and ethically dubious justification. </mini-rant>
Seriously, we have this discussion every time Google or the Wayback Machine or whatever comes up. Putting material on the Internet does not give up your copyright on it, place it in the public domain, grant others the right to reproduce it any way they see fit, or otherwise work differently to copyright laws as they apply to all other media. There are necessarily certain implied rights, but arguing that actually ripping someone else's material and then making it publicly available after they've withdrawn it from their own site is a pretty big stretch to anyone without a vested interest.
Before anyone shoots back the inevitable responses about information wanting to be free, not controlling the flow, yada yada, please stop and think for a minute. A lot of the useful content on the web is made available by volunteers or companies who don't expect to profit from it immediately, but whose future business may be damaged if the information is taken and republished by others. Many of these people will just stop putting information on the web at all (see Slashdot discussions passim) if you abuse the access, and that doesn't benefit anyone.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Let's see the other side of the story:
Don't slashdot them too hard, and please remember to disable your cache when you browse their pages (your brain's cache too!)... ;)
And if you printed out the site, would they want to sue you for "reproducing" that site? Along the same lines, would someone want to sue you because you kept a book you bought 10 years ago and the author had written a new version? This all smacks of this "on demand" nonsense and self-destructing media and even shades of Orwell's 1984 where the Ministry of Truth modifies ancient history when it suits their purposes. This is all part of an attempt of corporations with the complicity of the legal establishment to place absolute control of all media in the hands of said corporations. Which all leads to the fact that it's time for the Congress to enact a Corporation Control Act that would finally put a leash on these rabid idiots.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Anything posted on the web should automatically be in the public domain. The physical act of viewing a web page requires me to download its contents to my computer. That means the website in question is volunteering content for me to download (or at least view). Maybe if I'm a content provider, I have a right to be angry if someone uses that content to impersonate me, or whatever. But otherwise I must understand that I've just put the content on my readers computer- I have no real control at that point over what the reader does with that content.
You know, it's funny. The web used to be mostly about free organizations offering up content. Then companies figured out that people like the web, and so they started jumping on. Unfortunately though, they don't seem to want to play the web as it was meant to be played. The web was not designed to support copywrite controls, and I can't understand why companies constantly expect that it does.
Batman Begins could be viewed on the screen at the theater, so I can bring in a video camera to make a copy.
You didn't lock your car door, so it is ok to steal your car?
Fight Spammers!
Archive.org is a really good place to find lost treasures like Popeye or Merrie Melodies =)
I'm really sorry they get sued because I like their work.
It's an archive. It takes place into our cultur. You won't sue a library for storing archives !
Bonjour !
This is a prime example of only having electronic archives..
In one moment, a piece of 'history' is gone forever. Be it from a suit, or a 'change in opinion'.
Does it matter in this case? Who knows, but the principle is the same.
Paper books are good. Paper books are important.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It would certainly be beneficial to adopt such an approach, but for two basic problems.
Firstly, you impose a burden on anyone distributing their work to notify every archive (of which there could be many) that they do not wish their material to be archived. You could argue that this is what robots.txt is for, but short of passing laws to this effect or some piece of clear case law (that was a joke, BTW) in every jurisdiction, that file has no special legal standing. Moreover, since it's not widely known about, it's hard to see how such case law could be justified today anyway; a typical family publishing a web site on their ISP-hosted web pages couldn't reasonably be expected to know about the robot protocols.
Secondly, it's not entirely clear that without adequate protections such a group is providing an invaluable public service. If content providers become reluctant to share material that they might later publish for profit (say) because of the risk that someone else will gain the right to republish it first and diminish its value, this is not incentivising the distribution of works, which is the whole raison d'etre of copyright.
Without imposing something rather severe, like universal, worldwide guidelines on how any archive must be run, compulsory registration by all archives with some centralised service, and the absolute right of any copyright owner to have their content removed from all archives just by providing proof of their copyright ownership to that service, it's hard to see how you can reconcile the basic right of a copyright holder with the desirability of allowing archiving where no-one objects.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They say the Internet Archive violated their robots.txt. For all we know, their server may have failed to return the text file when it was requested. Or maybe they made a typo, like so many people find out after they claim their robots.txt was violated.
However it happened, you can't expect the Internet Archive to not mess up from time to time. They work with so much data they can't be expected to make anything more than a best effort to filter out the unauthorized pages. The archive's importance is recognized by many, including the US Copyright Office, who granted them a DMCA Exemption to copy software. I suppose not even the Copyright Office thought they needed an exemption to archive the web.
In this case, the archive was used to gather evidence of wrongdoing. This is like suing witnesses for telling the truth, because the truth was bad for your case, and confidential for that reason.
...and then watch where it goes. What's the difference between this system and a caching proxy? They both cache the site.. and then serve it up from their own systems some time later. Greeeeat.
I never noticed that before. Hmmm, good. It doesn't matter anyway, I removed it from my sig. No, I'm not shilling for anyone except perhaps Groklaw.
Honestly no I don't you think you have any moral right to control the distribution of things like that.
If you do not want your views to be critiqued in 20 years time then do not ever write them down or make them known to anyone.
The internet is really ( morally if not legally ) the public domain and once you hand over stuff to the public domain it can do what it likes with it.
It's cheap to sue, just a few thousand bucks at the lowest end, if that. The only relevant thing is the cost of litigation and the outcome, and both depend on the merits of the plaintiff's (the one who is doing the suing) case.
In this case, plainly, the case is bogus and the risk to the internet archive, which we know and love, is minimal. I bet they'll not have trouble finding law firms who'll do the work pro-bono. There are many firms looking to enhance their profile in internet law and this will be an easy case.
Don't panic.
The issue remains, however, that the content is just too easily available. You're not going to someone's home town and finding a yearbook in a library. You're typing a few words into a browser on a whim. As a culture, we're going to need to figure out what is and is not within the bounds of propriety. That is by necessity always going to be more ambiguous than law.
In 1987, while reading posts on my favorite Tucson based BBS (run at that time by a guy who called himself Zen Master on an APPLE IIe by the way) I remember reading a comment from someone that "ours is a medium where the snap response lives on indefinately." (or something really close to that) He was describing how weeks later old arguements would restart when someone came across an obnoxious post.
They used to say "Fish and visitors smell after three days". I think web content probably fits in there somewhere.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
... manage to take out the Wayback machine, I sure hope someone does something I'm too smart to say in writing.
Hopefully there is a tape somewhere of all those old websites. It might be a good idea to get a copy out of the country, just in case.
Sealand could get some free publicity by donating hosting space.
Hell I hope it does lose, then I can sue them for millions of dollars for breaking the copyright restrictions on my site. What a wonderful world that would be.
(Note: major sarcasm here, put the flamethrowers down please.)
If we'd just let Microsoft control everything, this kind of problem would never happen. Someone who wanted to publish their Intellectual Property on the web would be able to assert full Digital Rights Management over all of it, and when they revoked access to it, this "Internet Archive" (thieving little brats that they are... they're probably running that commie "open source" software too) would be left with nothing more than a bunch of useless encrypted bits.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
This is all about a company trying to counter the evidence that shows they are wrong. What the plaintif is doing here is simply attacking a third party company for passively providing evidence against them.
Now whether these evidences were legally "passively" kept is another story.
Copyrights law sure are complicated to apply but as far as I recall form my law cursus at university, copyright infrigements can really be declared if there was a will to use a content and make some kind of profit out of it (whether financial or not). Otherwise, as said before, MS Internet Explorer and any other browser should be modified to avoid caching any webpages.
What IA is doing is simply using some program to crawl over the internet and copy webpages for archives purpose. Just compare it to recording your favorite show on television. Theorically it is not permitted because of the copyright laws, however, no one is going to sue you for doing so. It is tolerated by the lawmakers.
The difference is that IA is giving a public access to its "recordings". However, the content stored on their servers are not in use as such anymore by the website owner (otherwise it would only be a mirror of a website and not an archive). Since the copyright laws are made in the sense of protecting an author against people using his / her material in a way that alter the benefit resulting from this material, the law cannot fully apply here and would loose it sense if it does.
Also, if one succeed in winning a case against IA for similar reasons, it would mean that any single case where archives comming from archives bureau have been used should be cancelled and retrialled because of lack of regularity in the legal procedures.
Therefore, I think the plaintif might not have a good legal base for their case and that it is very unlikely they get any good from this. On the contrary, they show their guilt to the public and weaken their position in their other case against the similarly named company. After all no one would sue someone for providing or helping to provide evidence in the one's favor.
I am a rat... or am I a penguin?
Let's get this straight.
Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia posts some web pages in 1999.
Later, Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia (through its lawyers McCarter & English of Newark) sues Health Advocate of suburban Philadelphia alleging trademark violation. Health Advocate's lawyers, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, look for evidence to defend their client. In 2003, some lawyer at Earley Follmer goes to the Wayback Machine and mirrors everything from Healthcare Advocates old sites.
We can infer that Healthcare Advocates doesn't like the evidence, because they tried to add a claim against Health Advocate for copyright violation, etc. in the original lawsuit. That court told them to stuff it.
Undeterred, Healthcare Advocates has now brought a separate suit against Earley Follmer (it's adversary's lawyers) and the Wayback Machine for the same copyright violations, etc. The court hasn't had a chance to tell them to stuff it again, but it's a fair bet that it'll happen soon.
Bottom line: Healthcare Advocates is trying to hide and suppress evidence by suing anyone who had a copy. Courts don't like that. This whole affair is likely to end badly for Healthcare Advocates.
YIAALBIANYL. GYOGDL. YMNO.
A lot of people are putting good thought into the case, into who is really suing who, and legal ramifications of Copyright. But, I prefer a K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) strategy here.
Internet Archive, archiving even copyrighted material, is a good endevour for historical purposes that transends even current law. Without this history, it will be forever lost, and even the mundane websites contribute to the "whole view".
I honestly don't care if IA/Wayback is legal or not. 200 years from now when all these lawyers are dust, there may still be the IA in place, and what the web was today may facinate future generations browsing through it much like archeologists walking through the Great Pyramids. In such context, I could give a damn if it is legal or not.
Truth > *
I8-D
Why should the archive even honour robots.txt files? Its just like a news paper printing a screenshot of a website for example to show that it had been defaced. These guys are suing not only the archive but also the people who accessed it, now that really is ridiculous. I really doubt Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia actually believe that what they are doing is right, they're just doing it for the money.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I'm really sick and tired of companies that have absolutely no clue how the Internet and the world wide web works putting up sites and then expecting you to never cache them anywhere.
Espeically since you can simply put a META tag in your HTML (or use robots.txt) to tell people (and robots) not save things.
I've more than one web page that shows up in neither the Wayback Machine, nor in any search results from search engines, because I put in a no-cache as well as noindex META tags.
This is not rocket surgery people. If a web designer / master does not know about these things then they are incompetent. (Though to be fair they may have been less well known in 1999.)
Other articles have stated that this also applies to web pages unless the author requests removal.
Is it though? If you thought of the Archive as the answer to the question, "What was at this web-site at that particular moment in time?", then it could be likened to a library containing an old newspaper.
If this lawsuit is successful, then would that translate into search engines (after all, what is Google other than a front-end over a "copy" of the web (albeit optimized for searching)? Search engines then wouldn't be able to spider sites without permission. What about browser cache? Proxy cache? "Save As" menu items? Alt-Print-Screen? Your own damned memory?
Looks like a slippery slope to me...
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
The question, of course, is whether or not you actually had legally-enforceable restrictions. Did you set up your robots.txt file? Does simply stating that a site is copyrighted, without registering it, actually mean that it is copyrighted?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site just so that you continue to come to my site to get updated versions of things.
I do this routinely with my technical papers exactly because I know they will be updated. They're usually available for people to view and read and link to, but I ask people not to make copies elsewhere and technically that "request" is enforceable under copyright law.
Now it's true that fair use allows some things to be copied for certain reasons. And, curiously, I think the need to copy for a lawsuit might stand up. But copying the entire of everything everywhere in anticipation of something being needed for a lawsuit sounds to me to be a questionable thing. To stretch the analogy one further: making a complete repository of photos of all store windows, almost as a workaround for the fact that those store windows were not directly accessible for use. That doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the fair use criteria is about the totality of the work, and while it's undefined how that comes into play in each instance, it's clear that the amount of bulk matters here.
Personally, I was initially uncomfortable with the Internet Archive, and I continue to be of mixed feelings about it. I think it serves a huge historical interest. However, in the nearterm it has some ill effects that run counter to the copying/distribution/presentation laws of copyright and may need some correction.
I might think it reasonable if
The disturbing part is that legal term of copyright seems to continue to lengthen with time. I'm a big fan of copyright as a form of personal control for authors to get income from their works, but copyright must lapse after some part and it is already well exceeding what I think is reasonable in that regard, with the trend looking to extend indefinitely as rich copyright holders influence congress to extend every time, say, Mickey Mouse comes into jeopardy.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
wasn't that an episode of sliders?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And why should we do this? Well, it's rather obvious. We already live in an oligarchy, might as well make it official.
</sarcasm>
If obtaining evidence illegally is acceptable, what ensures it was properly secured and documented? Why not just forge it?
Part of legal evidence gathering is ensuring you have a trail to prove it is valid.
Secondly what rights are trampled in the cause of getting that evidence?
By making illegally obtained evidence invalid you encourage proper behaviour. If the legal evidence is used to convict a killer the polic will get off with a slap on the wrists despite any crimes they may have committed.
If illegally obtaining evidence could cause that same killer to get off, you can bet the police would be extremely careful to ensure that the evidence is collected properly.
thank god i clealr my cache often. i'd hate to get sued for storing certain websites on my computer. i probably should shred all the ones i've printed out. i don't need that kind of evidence against me piling up on my desk. while i'm at it... my dvr is quite a bit of archived content on it. i'm sure the mpaa would have somethign to say about me watching those movies i recorded off of the movie channels over and over.. honestly, wtf?
;) kinda wish it was a little more thorough in archiving website images too...
The internet archive is a thing of beauty. It's cool to be able to go back and look at the world wide web as it was a few years ago. the only thing that disappoints me is that it doesn't go back to the time of blinking html and billions of animated gifs.
If you check http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html, you'll note that there are no date range options to the robots.txt file. In other words, you can't specify that historical data is to be excluded.
Aside from that, posting a robots.txt file after the lawsuit is like republishing source code under a different license. The new license does not affect the licensing of older copies of the code other people have saved away.
If you were allowed to expect caches to retroactively honor robots.txt, you could expect a flood of lawsuits from unscrupulous people adding robots.txt to their websites after they'd been added to archives.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I demand that Slashdot will remove this comment after 3 days! Or else I'll see you in court!
From the article:
Frivolous Lawsuit? Hardly.
Excellent Spin-doctoring on McDonald's Part? Absolutely.
Yeah, right.
for dumbest lawsuit of all time.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since the Robot Exclusion Protocol is voluntary, not mandatory, I don't think it would be "legally enforceable". It exists as a courtesy.
In the United States, putting any creative work into a fixed tangible form automatically confers the protection of copyright, effective from that moment. No notice or registration is required.
The search engines, archive sites, etc. should all make an industry-wide pact to *not* archive or index *anything* unless a robots.txt is found that authorizes it. Maybe it will get some of the useless spam sites out of the indexes in the process, as well as clear up all this legal crap, too.
So it's simple - if you don't want to be indexed or archived, that's fine. Nobody will know who you are. No problem.
A community-oriented lyrics site
Legal decisions are often based on previous decisions, and at this point they are comparing "similar" (though not the same) situations in the physical world with those in the digital world.
In terms of public domain, visibility, and various other terms the analogies aren't bad. It's quite similar to patent cases... just because you do something on the internet doesn't make it unique (which makes for a lot of dumb patents), and really taking an electronic 'snapshot' of a publicly visible webpage shouldn't be any different than taking a picture+photocopy of a physical notice/bulletin/sign/etc in a publicly visible location.
If they'd published the same information on a sign in their front lawn... what's to seperate it from the e-Version other than the fact that one is paint and the other is bytes?
No one has it right so far,
Listen in all towns and cultures all over the world their is usually some one who collects news, they write a journal, sort of a blog of what is heard by them.
The Wayback machine is the journal of the historians who run it.
It would be sad and pathetic if the courts rule that revisionists rule the day. No one will understand the past if they don't have history and journals to guide them.
As an example, people don't even understand the concept of privacy today like they did 15 years ago.
If you let them take away history you might as well BURN all the books with this ruling.
This is such a BAD case and It behooves all of us to reflect on this.
Remember how many books, bibles and personal journals were burned by Hitler?
This IS tantamount to burning history books or the bible to exterminate a truth that some one held.
We don't have any right to eliminate free speech in the past any more then we do in the present by shooting some one.
I think the plaintiff needs to understand this unless they want national comparisons in the news with other book burner revisionists.
Any more than retaining an early edition of a book or pamphlet would be. This is similar to suing me because I have an edition of your book which has since been abridged or changed. Keeping the book is not a violation of any copyright nor would be allowing someone to read or otherwise access that book. As long as I didn't change the form (making a copy of the book, for instance).
Trying to sue over truthful information just because it shows a weakness in your case is unjustiable. Even SCO hasn't tried that.
Yet.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Recording an event and reproducing that event != creating an event.
Read your own damn link. Although the person being sued is a professional photographer, the lawsuit is not because of a photograph, it's because of "his own work (which) is solely an expression of creativity" - from your article.
Your post being moderated "+5 Interesting", is interesting in itself.
Copyright prevents only: 1> the receiver of a legitimate copy from making a new copy (for another person), or 2> "publicly performing" it (somehow publicly exhibiting the legit copy without making a new copy).
Those two exceptions to the right to a free press do not suspend the rights to fair use of that legit copy. Which have been demonstrated to include personal use of the copy, like consuming it multiple times, even making multiple copies for "space shifting" for sole use of the person with the legit copy, if those actions are all done solely by the person owning the legit copy. That includes "private" performances, not public: bringing it to a party. Where your friend performs the copy (eg. plays the CD in their player), even if the other people at the party are not the CD owner's friend, but are just friends of the friend giving the party. It even includes loaning the legit copy to a friend - if they copy it, then they have violated the copyright, not the loaner.
Copyright and fair use are a lot more simple than many of the complicated stories the corporate press publishes (which benefits from confusion about copyrights). The DMCA is a much more complicated law, that tramples all over American "fair use" doctrine. Of course, it's just the Congress bowing down before the WIPO's WTO treaty: the local US version of that international law that hands over basic American sovereignty to the corporate multinational body that is now in charge of our 1st Amendment rights.
This case still has nuances which a judge must decide: is an archive of a published work, distributed without constraints, allowed to redistribute copies on request, despite a subsequent constraint specified at the source by the copyright owner (like deleting it from the server, implying "no more distribution")? If not, Internet caching is doomed. And the Internet as we know it is doomed. Unless the caching protocols are changed to accomodate distribution licensing changes indefinitely, they're all too dangerous. And the Internet depends on them.
--
make install -not war
The IP law firm Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe is suing Akashic Inc. for 1.436e17000 violations of US and International Copyright Law.
Akashic Inc is accused of "rampant distribution of every single piece of copyrighted material concievable throughout the history and future of humankind."
Timothy Leary from Akashic Inc. commented that "I have no doubt that we will emerge triumhant in no less than 99.9% of all possible universes in which the case is currently active."
The plaintiff looks to me like a charter member of the book-burning crowd when it is convenient for them. It will be interesting to see if we return to medieval times when consuming history is considered legal. -- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
As far as I know, there hasn't been any definitive court case anywhere on the basic concept of Usenet archives. They at least have some kind of defence, because you inevitably expect Usenet messages to propagate beyond your control, and you expect that services providing Usenet feeds will charge money to their customers in exchange for relaying the information. IMHO, for Usenet archives it's more a question of whether permanent storage is a reasonable expectation for which permission is implied by posting, which can at least be argued reasonably either way (e.g., it usually isn't and it's common expectation that messages will disappear after a few days vs. the technical standards not saying anything about necessary expiration and considerations of increased cheap storage space at service providers compared to when Usenet was first running).
I'm pretty sure that at least one business that reproduced Usenet via the web and added those annoying automated keyword-linked ads on top of someone's posts has been screwed for it in court, though; IIRC, they were found to be publishing a derivative work without permission. I've come across at least one techie forum that was abusing many posts I've made to a programming newsgroup this way, which I did find inappropriate (they are generating ad revenue purely from distorting words I wrote, even advertising compilers in a post whose whole point was that you shouldn't write code depending on a specific compiler!), so I don't have much sympathy. If anyone can remember the case that established this one, I'd appreciate a reference.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Well, now they've gone and pissed in the pool for the rest of us. Gee, thanks. I couldn't give two shits about their petty litigation, but now they're fouling up a utility that has helped me out on innumerable occasions. Frickin' hell.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
there is a famous photographer that makes his "art" by taking pictures of other photographers pictures... he gets away with it because he is not reproducing the actual picture, but a picture of a picture which is his own picture.. (he does not crop it to only the image).
The Internet Archive is the worst copyright infringement in the history of mankind. It's about time someone stops them. (Don't you dare mod me as troll, flamebait or funny! I'm dead serious.)
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Not exactly the kind of people you want to be defending. The fact that copyright law can be used this way suggests it is broken. The fact that it was created before our modern information economy was formed also suggests it is broken and in need of revision.
Credibility is not something you can easily steal, and the people who "get there first" tend to get the lion's share of credibility, even when competing against companies much larger than themselves.So your cheap shot about how people on Slashdot have nothing to lose is just that, a cheap shot with no substance or truth. We're not saying that copyright laws need to be entirely abolished, but they do need to be updated to reflect our modern society and information infrastructure. The fact that we're compelled to lay unenforceable law after unenforceable law down on top of copyright law in a vain attempt to keep it afloat in its current state should be evidence enough that things need to change.
Excuse me? What? A public website is by its very nature meant to be redistributed. It is replicated on millions of machines per day for many different purposes. If you do not agree to at least some redistribution for your website, then take it offline because it doesn't work without redistribution.Sue the caching proxy servers! Sue people who use internet cache! Sue Proximitron users! Sue link-of-the-day sites because they helped people replicate the data. Wait, why not just sue everyone online, because they were party to the crime by using the same routers!
Nice, avoiding his point entirely. Part of copyright law is the intent with which you distribute it. This helps prevent entrapment scenarios. If you place a public site on the internet, your intent is to have it treated like a public site. This means it will be crawled by search engines, cached by proxies, linked to by interested users, downloaded for personal offline browsing, pre-cached by Earthlink and AOL services, and archived by the wayback machine.This is the cost of doing business on the internet. This is how it works, and how it's going to continue to work. If you are not willing to express this intent with your website, take it down now.
Bear in mind that the article is about a large insurance corporation trying to deny benefits to a group of people, using copyright law as a club to beat evidence into inadmissibility. We're not talking about chinese knockoffs ruining a poor independent artist. We're talking about Yet Another Way Out for corporate America's scumbags.If copyright law allows this, then we need to tear it down and fix it, because I'm not willing to pay such a stiff price for a basic kind of protection that I probably can't afford to fight in court anyways.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
They DID have a robots.txt and, they contend, the internet archive took the web pages and archived them anyway!
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
What? do I have to throw away my mother Reader's Digest from the '40s?
A user pulling up this page on the Archive would generate a request to the original server, which would then show up in the original server's log.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Since to get to the reader, your web page gets copied, folded, spindled, mutilated, stored, sniffed, copied some more across a different path, cached, deleted, revived, copied into another cache, and finally gets rendered, THAT gets cached, and then it gets copied over a VGA cable at over 50 times per second and displayed on a monitor where someone can commit it to memory or whatever...
:-P )
Not to mention that to find the page, it got spidered, cached some more, stored, placed into an automated retrieval system (AND retrieved) and foldspindlemutilated some more just for fun.
So! If you don't want one of more of those things to happen: The Only Way To Win Is Not To Publish At All. (otherwise, it'll just never get read anyway
I respectfully disagree.
The wrongs that would ensue if illegally obtained evidence is allowed to be used are the same as the wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence.
If by "the wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence" you mean the results of a crime (say, the wrong created by a handgun fired at the cashier of a liquor store during the course of an armed robbery, resulting in the cashier's death); then I would argue that the wrongs are not the same at all.
The idea of not allowing illegally obtained evidence to be used in a criminal trial is to protect 'The People' from abuses by 'The State'. Using evidence that has been illegally obtained may result in the conviction of a guilty person, except that doing so is (usually) found to be a violation of an U.S. citizen's right "...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".
I believe the theory is that if the police were regularly permitted to use illegally obtained evidence in a trial, it would moot the Fourth Amendment protections of the Constitution, resulting in something awfully similar to a police state. Think of this: if a police officer knows that any "evidince" they find during the course of an investigation will be permitted in a trial, then there is no check upon their power to search and seize (illegal searches are often the reason why evidence is suppressed). If an officer knows they don't need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a search, what's to stop them from randomly searching ANY person, place, or thing, at ANY time, for ANY reason (under the guise of 'conducting an investigation', of course)?
An innocent person may feel they have nothing to hide, but do you really want the police tossing your home at 3AM because you fit the description of somebody who committed a crime recently? What if that description was merely "black male"? What if you happen to be a black male, and the cops go digging through your home looking for a firearm and find your marijuana stash instead? Oops, now you're gonna go to jail for drug charges, and it doesn't even matter that you were nowhere near that liquor store when it was robbed. The sort of damage that such a system would do to our freedoms is far worse than the damage done to the prosecutor's case by suppressing evidence of a murder/armed robbery that had been illegally obtained.
Furthermore, what if the police don't find anything during the search of your house, but decide that they need a conviction, so they simply plant evidence instead? Things like warrants and chain of evidence are designed to prevent such abuses, but if police do not have to follow those procedures, you can kiss that notion goodbye.
I'm with Brin on this one: how are you going to prevent revealing your identity when every's palmtop is powerful enough to datamine the Net? I'll take a picture of you and do a Google Images+ search for "pictures that feature this object", and once enough people are pushing photographs of every second of their life onto Flikr...
"What if it is one of those free "alternative weeklies" that no-one has to pay for?"
.just like you picked up a whole stack of those free papers. :-)
I like that analogy. The paper was given away for free, so you should be able to save a copy and give it away for free.
The question is whether archiving a web page and then allowing others to view it is the same as giving away your original version of the paper(OK) or re-printing it and giving away new copies(not OK)
The rule should be that if you visit the page 'X' times, then you can allow 'X' hits on your "copy" of the page . .
Also, keep in mind that, unlike virtually every other profession, law never modernized and has no real concept of serving the public good over self-interest. If medicine were practiced like law, every person who got sick would face a system where half the doctors they dealt wanted them dead and were, in fact, being handsomely paid to insure that they die.
Also, there'd be no concept of "truth" residing above what physicians do. A doctor who invests in a particular drug company would be doing all he could to sell its products, prescribing them even whey they were actually harmful and trying to dupe his fellow physicians to do the same. And when his investment portfolio changed, he'd be doing everything he could to keep the medicine from selling--including lying and covering up evidence of its effectiveness.
That's why there's no real independent research in law on, for instance, the ability of witness to correctly indentify a criminal seen under difficult conditions. Each side has its fake experts who defend one point of view, right or wrong, because that point of view means they win. That's law as practiced by lawyers.
Law is premised on the concept that if you have two sides, each doing all they can to have their paid-for point of view win, truth will somehow win out. In practice, the winner is often the person with the most money to hire the cleverest lawyers. Truth, right, justice, fairness have nothing to do with how law is practice. Lawyers really are, as popularly believed, whores. They're just very expensive ones.
And yes, a clever and decent judge can somehow counter this madness. That's why it's important that we get more Justices like Scalia and Thomas on the Supreme Court. As the Kelo decision demonstrated, those of the other sort (liberal) think that the government can take anyone's property and pass it on to some private entity, usually a rich corporation simply because the latter will feed more money into tax receipts. Kelo, a nurse, is losing her home to appease the appetite of the most lucrative drug company on the planet.
Justices Scalia and Thomas are also strong champions of free speech for the Internet, including blogs. Recently a Seattle-area judge ordered two talk show hosts to quit promoting a reduction in the gas tax, citing a federal 'campaign reform' law that Scalia and Thomas quite rightly said was an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. At the time of that decision, the Seattle Times critized Scalia and Thomas, saying the law would never be used against the 'real' news media. Now the Seattle Times has apologized, admitting that Scalia and Thomas were right.
In short, if you want a free Internet, you want right-wing 'extremists' like Scalia and Thomas on the Supreme Court.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site
Hellooooo, pragma NO-CACHE?
I bet they got it from a website that the public can access. If that's true, then so much for "unauthorized," since it means the plaintiff published the information. Pretty hilarious that you can publish information and serve it out to the public, and then bitch about the information being used against you.
The file exists for a reason. It's a darn archive, for posterity, get over it. Don't like it put a robots.txt file in your directory.
Sometimes I wish I could decide court cases.
Would they be able to sue if I'd bought a storage farm and started archiving the web. In 10 years time when I have 100,000 Terrabytes of data, and wish to use some of it in a legal defense is that illegal?
Is there any difference between that and whats happened here. It was in the public domain then, how is it suddenly no longer so?
A sibling to this comment links to an article which its own child comment points out is very helpful in understanding that not all lawsuits are bad. In fact, very few lawsuits are frivolous, and most of the frivolous lawsuits you have heard about are either debunked by snopes or quietly dismissed.
Since I normally don't buy into conspiracy theories, and because I agree with some of his policies, I won't call it anything more than a coincidence that President Bush is pro-tort-reform and there is a widespread occurrence of annoying forwarded e-mails telling lies that, if believed, would convince anyone that tort reform is necessary.
Tort reform is nothing more than big business trying to save money. Watch Fight Club and understand the business logic behind product recalls. If the legal system is "reformed" in the way that big business (and its supporters in the Republican Party; too bad I hate the Democrats more - they're hypocritical and bad, while the Republicans aren't as hypocritical but are just plain bad) wants it to be reformed, the lawsuit side of the inequality "L > R" (where L is the cost of lawsuits and R is the cost of a recall to make the product safe and avoid those lawsuits; and where L > R represents the condition where a recall will be performed to make the product safe) will always be zero, and 0 > R is never true. It just makes business sense.
Don't buy into legal reform. 99% of the time, the legal system works just fine. It just isn't news when that happens.
Please try *reading* the article he linked to before modding him informative. The incident is totally isn't even remotely similar to this one.
what a bunch of nancy boys.
w00t
If that's true, we had all better be careful not to visit *too* many pages on a given website during a given day. Either that or make sure that our web browser is set to immediately flush all downloaded content once it has been rendered.
The argument being made is that copyright is being violated, but the way the archive works might well be considered fair use, since the *only* reason it exists is for archival purposes. If having a copy of website content is illegal, in and of itself, then everyone who uses a web browser (unless they're running knoppix or something that doesn't store anything to the HD) is just as guilty as the Internet Archive.
I hereby rescind your permission to copy any of my posts, which means that if you're reading this, you're in violation of copyright law.
Okay, I now release my copyrighted work officially into the public domain. You're safe now.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Except that if you want to share your memory of a web page at a certain point in time, nobody has a right to stop you-- no matter how accurate or automated your saving this memory is.
Luke-Jr
Libraries (ITUSA), however, have a number of specific exemptions in Copyright law.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Part of the point in The Transparent Society is that if we reconfigure civil society and agree to give up our privacy together, we can go back to doing something more productive than making a better mask. Remember: arms races are bad for the economy (in the long run). Also, a transparent society includes a transparent government, which is good for democracy, and transparent corporations, which are good for capitalism.
Spider: Hi, I'm an Internet Spider, may I access this page?
RT: No, no, one thousand and twenty-four times NO! I will not give this page to a spider.
Spider: Okay. How about this other page?
If this were the case, then the only way of bypassing this mechnism -- and one that would violate the sprirt (IMHO), if not the letter (IANAL), of the DCMA would be for your Spider to not identify itself as a spider. Then it would be trying to trick an Access Control Mechnism.
BTW, it's my on opinion that once you publish a page on the Internet for public viewing, you cannot complain if they've Time-Shifted that viewing to a later point by recording -- ur, saving -- it on recordable media. Seems to me that the plantifs are totally wrong, got caught at it by their own web-postings, and are now trying to kill the messenger.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
they will use it to disallow info in a future court preceeding. If they have the courts rule it illegal, then upon appeal of the first case, they will be able to deny the other lawyers the data needed.
IOW, they are trying to rewrite history. Now, they need some conservative activist judge to help them out.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How will the fact these things were published on the Internet affect this issue.
This is like suing someone for reading a book in a public library, imho.
Yes, the IA makes these documents available, BUT, they're available in the exact same way they were before. Since when is it illegal to possess old information?
If a company doesn't want something to be publically accessable they should never put it on the Internet. I just hope the judge agrees with me on this...
...claiming they did not have permission to watch you committing the crime yesterday,with thinking you have shredded all the evidence. A sues B for copying. B says we were here first, check the public record. A sues to keep public record from being checked, claiming they hold copyright on that public record.
There's just so much wrong with the idea of allowing illegal evidence, I'm surprised when anyone asks why it's wrong.
Because sometimes "stolen workpapers" (one of the many forms of illegal evidence) is the only way to prove that any wrongdoing existed. If the choice is between allowing criminal activities to be allowed to go unpunished and some illegally obtained evidence, I'll take the one that punishes the one that started the mess in the first place. How would you investigate a corporation that you suspected of breaking the law? Even if they had proof on paper, you could never find it. I'm sure there are literally billions of pieces of paper in storage at some of those corps. Are you going to subpoena the entire corporation? You'll get so much data that even if they give you what you are looking for, you won't find it (and why would a criminal give you proof of their criminal activities?). If you get a search warrant, then you'll still be in the same mess, presuming you even look in the right places.
No, most cases like this are investigated after an Enron type implosion, or when someone on the inside leaks information out - usually illegally. Oh, and the cops can't break in and steal it, but someone taking it on their own accord is still usually breaking the law.
Learn to love Alaska
Is copyright really the issue here? The presence of an old web site is NOT like distribution of a copyrighted book. It is more like making a book available for reference at the local library.
How can the presence of an old page possibly harm someone, especially financially? This whole thing smacks of irresponsible money-grubbing to me.
Seems to me that this case tries to legalize obstruction of justice by demanding from the IA to destroy evidence of misconduct.
Maybe you have the right to keep a copy, but you don't necessarily have the right to distribute that copy, and that's what's really at stake here. The Internet Archive is not merely storing a copy of the published page; they're also distributing it. Maybe it's fair use, maybe not, the court will decide. But I don't like their chances. It was only a matter of time before someone called them on it.
I think you need to learn what copyright infringement is, because either you don't have a clue, or you just enough intelligence to know how to apply it. In what way are they infringing on copyrights? They aren't doing anything anyone of us couldn't do. Simply copying over publicly viewable webpages onto their machines. If I had a couple extra petabytes around I could probably do it as well. heck, while you're looking up what copyright infringment is, read up on what a copyright is, what can be copyrighted, intellectual property, public knowledge, and fair use.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
I wonder if the "alternative weekly" publishers would mind one but if others were actually duplicating the papers intact and distributing these copies?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
If I claim copyright to my website, and do so conspicuously in each page on which I claim copyright, and even though it is in the public view, I still reserve the right to sue you if you violate that copyright.
First off, let me say I love the wayback machine - it has helped me numerous times find information that I thought was long gone. It is a resource that I think should be kept and preserved.
With that said, and at a risk of "Godwinizing" myself - I have to ask:
Does anyone today really seem to give a damn about learning from the past?
How many wars must humanity fight before it figures out that war does no one any good? How much suicidal destruction must occur before people understand that such acts do nothing to help their cause? How much longer will humanity suffer under the oft-perpetuated myths of religion before rationality is seen as the true path to peace?
Think I am wrong? Think about the world today, and the world of the past. What is happenning today - what continues to happen - is no different from what has happenned in the past. It continues over and over again, the same actions, the same reactions and more pain. Everybody feels it, both the aggressor and the defender - yet despite all of this, the rest of the world stands by, yawns, and switches the channel. Despite all that is happenning, neither side (and in reality, there are many more than two) can seem to think "gee, the other side might be feeling just as bad as my side - perhaps I should talk with them, instead of kicking them down".
For instance - one would think humanity would have learned the pain and lessons of genocide from World War 2 - the history is there, the truth is easy to see (sans attempts at revisionist history, of course) - the pain is real.
So - where the hell is the world in regards to Rwanda? Where the hell is the world in regards to Bosnia? Where the hell is the world in regards to Nigeria?
These are only three relatively recent examples of genocide and ongoing genocidal actions. They are well known, they are deplorable. Still, little to nothing is being done about them.
All the history of the past at our hands, all the information on the planet, all the technology, all of everything - yet we all turn blind eyes away from real problems which we should be seeking to solve and stop.
We have the ability, we just don't have the rationality and will. We are still nothing more than apes flinging our excrement at each other.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Hey, guess what? That data you received from slashdot.org? It was redistributed by a dozen of boxes. Worse! It might even have been redistributed more than once, to multiple targets!
I guess those people calling for an Internet license might be on to something...
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
Hope this doesn't affect mirrordot...
According to their website, they claim that they think their legal because:
MirrorDot, Inc. does try to consider the copyright issues with mirroring other sites and content. We look to things like Google's cache, Yahoo's cache, Coral, and the Way Back Machine as similar and "accepted." They all cache/mirror sites and serve them directly. Likewise, MirrorDot's mirrors are specifically transient - a page is automatically mirrored when it is linked from a Slashdot front page story, and the mirror is automatically deleted from MirrorDot a few days later. (http://www.mirrordot.com/faq/)
<overrated>Insert Sig Here</overrated>
You forget that here in the US the big, foreign-owned multinational corporations pay GOOD MONEY to get the laws that THEY want passed. Nobody gives a damn about the public, least of all the politicians that the big foreign-owned multinationals own.
Isn't this just a publicly accessible TIVO? I'm just time-shifting my web site viewing. That's all. Isn't that fair use?
Ever-changing masks aren't exactly all that comfortable, either. I think it's hard to say off the top of my head which future would be more compatible with human nature, but it certainly seems like a good area for research. Hell, maybe the Internet is going to require us to genetically/psychologically engineer everyone just to keep from going crazy.
Because the Internet Archive is free; because corporations and governments (in the US and elsewhere I am sure) have in the past changed information on websites in an effort to hide or obfuscate things and don't like the fact that any person with an internet connection can reference older pages and prove in court that information did once exist in a state that a corp or govt may wish to deny; because it is a true history of what has happened (in the sense that it provides the original information without trying to wrap it in bias or viewpoints) rather than someone else's opinion or version of what once existed; again, because it is free and provides free access to music and other media (some of which is very political in nature), websites, and other information without having to go through a traditional "gatekeeper" of any sort; because of all of these things I expect that the Internet Archive will be attacked more and more as time goes on in various ways by corporate and state powers. (Especially as the US decends further into fascism in the 21st century). I hope I am wrong, but I don't think that I am. I'm surprised that I haven't heard certain politicians claiming that the Interet Archive is a form of online Socialism. (you remember the commies right? ya know, our old Bogeyman from before terrorism stole his thunder)?
The link said NYTimes. Instinctively we began looking for "non-reg" links in the discussion.
In the United States, putting any creative work into a fixed tangible form automatically confers the protection of copyright, effective from that moment. No notice or registration is required.
That's simply not true. You have to be able to prove that you created it first, and if you want the right to be the sole receiver of royalties from your work, you have to register it with the copyright office. This isn't free, either.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Archive.org has always had a good policy to removing data on request.
They have an automatic version that allows use of robots.txt, when forbidden to crawl they go back and make the other, older versions unavailable as well. (It only works when the re-crawl happens, though I think you can initate it by going to the site.)
Furthermore, additional requests can be made via email to remove content. The only "damage" here is that the wrong (in their opinion) law firm got ahold of the data before they could do that.
The company suing, broke the law, got sued, got fucked, and now wants to sue to recover money due to them breaking the law and getting busted for it by going after archive.org that provided evidence in the original lawsuit. Sorry guys, you got fucked when you first stole trademarked stuff of someone elses web site. The rest of it is just sour apples. They should be charged with intimidating a witness and put in pound me in the ass federal prison for it. It's racketteering like that that gives lawyers such a bad name.
Had they any brains, they would have employed a geek to go seek out these cached sources and remove them the first time around.
AND the company suing the original offending company, should have used a simple entry in their HOSTS file to keep from accidentally causing requests to go to the original web server, that's simple data forensics.
Let me tell you a story about my week in mid September, 2001. After wasting tons of time reading news I got a desparate call from a certain client (soon to be rather). Their web host was in the towers, and both server farms were demolished, along with all the backup tapes. Their site was gone. AND due to other complications they were losing customers left and right.
I used Archive.org, Google cache and a few bits they had to reassemble the web site and get it back on line. In this case, un-pre-approved caching was critical in keeping this company from going out of business.
There 1,000s of other systems that cache data and make it available later, Inktomi, Akami, corporate networks, those "high speed dial-up" things, my friggin open source firewall does that (Squid?). It's simply stupid to sue archive.org for that. Caching is part of the web, get fucking used to it.
It's the webmasters damn job to know or learn all about this stuff (including caching). Slapping HTML up on some server is not the end of web managment. There's a whole lot more to it.
Can you sue a witness because he remembered the facts against you during a trial the same way the Wayback Machine is being sued because it "remembers" old facts and saying and has been used in courts?....
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
I know you're all going to find this shocking, but it looks like the
1. Healthcare Associates of Philly sues Health Advocate. The law firm representing the plaintiff is McCarter & English. The defendant's is Harding et al.
2. Healthcare Assoc. modifies robots.txt to tell IA not to allow access to older versions of their site. 3. Harding et al. manages to get the IA to give them a peek anyway*.
4. Healthcare Assoc. sees "rapid fire" requests from Harding in their logs, and a few times the IA slipped up and granted access anyway.
5. Healthcare Assoc. sues Harding et al. and the IA.
*My guess is that the IA checks the current robots.txt everytime an archived page is accessed. If the server doesn't respond quickly enough, the assume it's OK to give access to the archived files. Harding et al. might have realized this and requested the pages over and over in rapid succession to slow down Healthcare Assoc.'s servers enough to trick IA into thinking they're not responding. This is all just my speculation, so take it with a grain of salt.
(Sorry for the crappiness of the diagram. Apparently Slashdot is more concerned with preventing 13-year-olds from posting ASCII art versions of gotse man that will be modded down to -1 in 2 seconds than it is with allowing people to make diagrams to illustrate something. And why the eff doesn't the "ecode" tag work properly?)
Better sue everyone who has visited the website in question but never purged their temporary internet files folder.
plus visitors that also never purged their memory in their own brain using some suitable and "safe" (i.e. "no leftover memories") technique, like blowing a head with hand-granade, etc.
:)
hany
You responded to "This company dumped the pages out on the public Internet, with no robots.txt. Surely they know what that means.". You are referring to software made publicly available for free on the Net, such as freeware and shareware, right? As far as I know, it is legal to copy, distribute, and archive this type of software software.
If you are referring to closed commercial software, then your analogy is WAY off.
"Well. I know this company that sells computer software with no copy prevention mechanism"
Are pages archives at archive.org pages that are sold? Of course not. They are given away. Did you think this through first? The "given away" vs "sold" difference rips your analogy to shreds.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Use tor: http://tor.eff.org/
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
The law you're talking about is only an exemption to the US-based DMCA. The rest of the world doesn't necessarily recognise it. Moreover, AFAICS on a quick look, it doesn't actually cover the copyright issue, but the circumvention of copy protection technology.
Sorry, you'll have to find more than that to convince this audience...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Not true. The consumers were able to consume the coffee safely. Surely they were aware of the temperature: they were drinking it!
" more than 700 people were burned by McDonald's coffee with varying degrees of severity. "
During this same time, there were many billions of cups sold. This works out to one burn incident per 24,000,000 cups sold. That is a rather safe product. The burn incidents did not happen because the product was defective. They happened because someone did something stupid with it.
"McDonald's did not intend to reduce the heat of its coffee"
Why? This is the recommended serving temperature, and it is how the customers preferred it.
"McDonald's did not warn customers of this risk "
Yes they did. They always advertised it as hot coffee.
Frivolous lawsuit? Yes. It is hard to come up with a better example of one.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
A police officer makes a search of Hannibal Lector's house, and discovers a freezer full of prime cuts from former philharmonic orchestra members. Hannibal is then arrested and a court trial ensues. Unfortunately, it turns out that the search was illegal because there was no warrant and no probable cause. Do we let Hannibal go free?
Of course not!
Illegally obtained evidence is still evidence. The solution is not to through it out, but to punish the police officer who made the illegal search. That's actually how the system used to work. You don't let the known serial killer go free, you instead arrest the cop.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I notice you dropped any mention of archiving and republishing from that list.
The software industry has always made money in both ways, and they're both important. Without either, it is unlikely that the industry would be as successful (by any useful measure).
As for adapt or die, remember you said that when abusing the system means you can't buy any DVD player that isn't locked down in hardware to force viewing a half-hour of ads before every movie, you can't download any music without DRM nor connect any "untrusted" device to the Internet, any open forum on the Internet is subject to government moderation, use of technology like P2P and Bittorrent is a criminal offence, and all your Internet access is logged so that if any material that might breach these conditions is traced to you, you can be sent to prison for 10 years under the successor to the DMCA. That is the kind of adaptation that your attitude encourages, and right now, the big content providers are happily following the road, the small content providers are getting screwed, and the rest of us will pay for both along with you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
robots.txt is a technical measure controlling access to a copyrighted work.
The technical measure is an open standard which explains rules for automated access to copyrighted works.
If there is a robots.txt, one could argue it is a valid measure.
If it was added afterwards, the content was posted without restriction.
The Vogon ships can come now.
You need to dig into the court transcripts. Hannibal is still in prison because he ate the bailiff.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Wouldn't a simple, "Could you please remove the archive from your server" have sufficed?
Besides that, I don't see how access to the public web site was unauthorized and/or illegal.
My lame blog.
You do realize that this is patently incorrect?
Pardon me if this sounds pedantic, but tort law is so misunderstood that I'd like the opportunity to correct this post.
In Common Law countries, all people have a duty to act as would a reasonably prudent person in the same or similar circumstances. A person is negligent if they breach that duty and cause injury to another.
In other words, the city is negligent if it fails to repair a sidewalk that a reasonably prudent person would have repaired. In situations where a party lacks notice of a defect, the same analysis applies: should a reasonably prudent person responsible for the maintenance of a sidewalk have been aware of the defect.
Here's an example: 10 minutes ago, NYC experienced a minor, highly localized earthquake that fractured the sidewalk outside my apartment. 7 minutes ago, I realized I was out of milk. 4 minutes ago, I stepped out of the building, tripped on the damaged sidewalk, and broke my leg in 12 places.
A reasonably prudent city probably wouldn't be able to repair the damage in the six minutes between earthquake and injury. Probably, the city government wouldn't even be aware of it by then. Thus, the city couldn't be negligent.
A more likely explanation is that the law firms are videotaping the sidewalks and sending them to the city government to put them on notice of serious flaws in the sidewalk. Then they can argue that the city was on notice of the defects and failed to act reasonably by not repairing the damage.
But negligence does not require evidence of willful conduct. Negligence is merely a failure to act as a reasonably prudent person under the circumstances.
--AC
Now that you've modded the parent down, you should mod me down too.
That's true, now. There was a time that a specific act had to be shown, and the person specified. Over a hundred years ago, a man was injured when a loose barrel came flying out of a brewery and hit him. He sued for negligence, and won, even though nobody could be shown to have caused it. This was because the incident was so outrageous that there was no possible explanation without assuming negligence, and it established a new legal priciple: res ipse loquitur, the act speaks for itself.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
What ends up happening is too many frivolous lawsuits from pratfalling stumbling oafs, and the city ends up being rather resistant to having sidewalks at all. They balk at requiring them in construction and new work due to the hassle.
This has gotten rid of a lot of public pools; people would rather sue than take responsibility for their own swimming behavior or watch their children.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
1. The 'interweb' is a publishing medium. Like it or not, it is. People who put up websites are publishing HTML documents.
2. Publishers have no rights governing the public use of published documents so long as they are
a. properly attributed
b. provided in unadulterated form
c. the third party is acting in a
documentary, educational
or editorial capacity
Since the internet archive is not a for-profit organization, and does not seek income from the wayback machine, the issue is much less thorny than it might otherwise be.
The archive is not 'republishing' the documents. They are presenting a static representation of the site as it existed at a given point in time. Copyright, in no way, shape, fashion or form restricts this ability. It is no different than photography. It is permissable for a photographer to photograph anything he/she can get a shot of without otherwise breaking the law. Model releases (for people and private landmarks) are only required for shots that are to be sold, or published-for-profit.
The law is quite clear that no model release is required for photos used for educational, historical or editorial purposes unless it is mis-attributed. Similarly, no publisher may prevent the use of or reference to a book, magazine or document for educational, historical or editorial purposes unless those terms are explicitly accepted by the viewer prior to presentation.
This website is no different - no website is any different. The only possible exception to this would be areas of sites protected by login, where the argument could be made that viewing those pages is subject to accepting the site's terms of use... But if you read most terms of use, they only say that they are not responsible for inaccuracies in the site, not that you are expressly enjoined from saving the pages for later offline viewing.
Even so, I'm fairly certain that the wayback machine doesnt crawl protected areas of a site, rendering the point moot.
It can be convincingly argued that the sole purpose of a website is to be used/read. Those areas that are not locked down are, by definition, intended for public consumption unless entry to the site prevented pending the acceptance of specific terms of use.
If that is the case, then you cannot convincingly argue that the publisher who elected to publish the site - in a publicly accessible venue - with the purpose of public consumption - should then have the right to prevent documentarians from presenting these public displays so long as they are properly attributed, presented without meaningful adulteration, and in the correct context. They do not have these rights in the printed world, and should not have them in the digital either.
The question of copyright is a red herring, really. To extend copyright law to this extreme would render Warhol's 'Campbell Soup Can' an illegal reproduction because it was produced without the express consent of the company. It would also allow comapnies to prohibit the reproduction and display of old advertising and product packaging - even when they were of historical significance.
From the FA (emphasis mine):
I'm fairly certain that the Internet Archive has no control over access to Healthcare Advocates own webserver(s). I'm also fairly certain that the Internet Archive would not log access to archived web content back to the "Web logs at Healthcare Advocates". So someone at Healthcare Advocates or its legal firm is really, really grasping at nonexistent straws here, or just plain stupid/ignorant. Suing the Internet Archive because Healthcare Advocates' own webserver(s) served up outdated content that they themselves left accessible? (robots.txt is no substitute for simply removing the old files from the webserver(s)' document tree or otherwise restricting access at the server side.)
Hopefully sanity prevails and this lawsuit is dropped. Either that or Healthcare Advocates and/or its legal representation is made a laughingstock in the courtroom.
In the US, the copyright does exist at creation. Even after an infringement, you have 30 days (or is it 90?) to register your copyright and sue for a restraining order and/or actual damages. After you've registered, any future infringers could be liable for statutory damages, which are often much larger than actual damages.
You are correct. I should have said "a person acts negligently if he acts or fails to act as would a reasonably prudent person under the circumstances." --AC
1. Create a website. ...
2. Put a legal disclaimer on the website saying websites aren't allowed to link to me if they have a high readership and will knowingly transmit a high volume of those readers whenever a link is created to my site.
3. Invent something cool.
4. Wait to get slashdotted.
5.
6. Profit!
IANAL, but... actually, it is. Since 1978, copyright has been granted automatically on the creation of the work, with registration required only to exercise certain legal options such as recovering statutory damages. See Title 17 USC Chapter 3, Section 302 (a) for this, and Chapter 4, Sections 411 and 412 for the limitation on what you can do without registering. The exclusive rights granted by copyright (Chapter 1, Section 106) remain in effect regardless of registration.
Seeing as how every website is copied to your cache when you view it. Is the problem not that the website/page was copied but rather that it was available for viewing?
Does this mean that everything publicly viewable on the internet may be copied so long as it is not re-shown (or for lack of a better term, re-"published")?
*in this hypothetical the wayback machine does not exist.
For instance, would I have the same legal trouble as the archive if...
Entity A puts up a website on which a crime was committed. Namely, a copyrighted image was shown without the copyright holders (Entity B's) permission.
I had viewed the site and the cached copy is still on my harddrive. I have not re-"published" (re-shown) it on the internet (it is not publicly available). Entity A takes down the site. Later, entity b finds out about the copyright violation, but the site is no longer available in its former state.
Entity B finds out that I have a cached copy left from when I viewed the site. While in litigation entity B asks that my copy be subpoenaed as evidence.
What's wrong with that?
In this case, I am the archive. Why would I be sued? Entity A can sue me because I hold incriminating evidence against them? This whole thing is ridiculous...
Which is the problem:
1) the fact that website was "copied" in the first place or
2) the fact that the "copy" was available to the public?
If it is "2)" then what do we say about the Library of Congress?
Again...the whole thing is ludiculous.
SCO anyone :(
Kill them Kill Them all
Perhaps we missed a step, where we concluded that retaining a complete record of the entire Internet was actually in society's best interests (or indeed even technically possible). IMHO, what we're really interested in is preserving the works likely to be of value and perhaps the overall picture of the Internet for historical interest, not every banner ad and spam that ever existed, and every personal message written quickly while drunk and taken down just as quickly when sober.
I'd suggest that a far better approach would be to simply provide an opt-in service, where anyone happy for their material to be archived could easily indicate this. In particular, anyone contributing an article to the Internet for free -- something likely to be a work of value and at risk of disappearing -- would be encouraged to send a copy to the archive, or do something robots.txt-ish to let the archive find and store it for them automatically. If this were commonly known, I imagine most people would opt in; after all, they're happy to make their material available in the first place.
Making the system explicitly opt-in doesn't require a lot of effort on the part of contributors, and avoids every single problems we've discussed in this thread with concerns over privacy, copyright, or whatever deterring people from contributing information if they fear it will last forever.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
10 minutes ago, NYC experienced a minor, highly localized earthquake that fractured the sidewalk outside my apartment. 7 minutes ago, I realized I was out of milk. 4 minutes ago, I stepped out of the building, tripped on the damaged sidewalk, and broke my leg in 12 places.
And instead of going to the hospital, you promptly go to Slashdot and post your story in an article about copyright law.
you stealing information from your company and giving it to the police does not constitute illegal search and seizure. (unless you are acting at the request of a government agent)
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
The problem is not their having the archive but their redistributing it to anyone who asks. Keep your temporary internet files, but if you set up apache to serve from their folder you may well be violating the websites' copyright. Seems fair enough to me.
I am trolling
you stealing information from your company and giving it to the police does not constitute illegal search and seizure.
I am not clear then on what "illegally obtained" means in the posts before ours. I took it to mean anything that was obtained illegally. You take it to mean that it was obtained by the police direclty in an illegal manner, not that it was legally handed to the police after a number of illegal actions not involving the police. So we are both right.
Learn to love Alaska
"The answer to problems with information like drafts and trade secrets being public knowledge after being published is simple, don't publish them. If you don't want people to read drafts of unfinished works, don't publish them online."
ThinkSecret and Apple
"You do realize copyright law, even today in theory, insures that all copyrighted works are to be preserved for the public and given over to the public for all time once it expires right?"
Your diary.
"And how many better authors would we have today if we did have Shakespeare's drafts to look at to help understand his writing process?"
We're talking about US copyright. Plus even back in the day government censorship via copyright was every bit a worry as corporations run amok.
"Most copyright law in the world is pretty similar to that in the U.S., but fine lets ignore the U.S. constitution. Lets talk about natural versus artificial rights. Freedom of speech is in my opinion a natural right. Copyright is, in my opinion an artificial right, granted as part of an agreement between authors and those who would benefit from said authorship. Authors are rewarded for giving works to the public with the rights to make money. What advantage does a copyrighted work that is not available to the public give to the people who are giving up their natural right to copy it freely?"
There's no "natural right" to copying. There's the "artificial right" to copy. Much as copyright is artificial. Free speech is a natural right because it doesn't depend on others to exercise.
I need to be more clear...
When I said "That's simply not true," I was referring to putting any creative work into a fixed tangible form automatically confers the protection of copyright, effective from that moment. What "protection" is there without registration? Certainly not the protection of your right to profit from your work.
It all really started when he said he would "sue them for millions of dollars for breaking the copyright restrictions on [his] site". I meant to convey the point that he couldn't get any money without registering the copyright.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
FTA:
Whatever the circumstances behind the access, Mr. Patry said, the sole result "is that information that they had formerly made publicly available didn't stay hidden."
Seems like the perfect definition for "Cyber Shredding"
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
the people suing the archive need to be shot and then hung from lamp posts to serve as an example to others. Do the same to the RIAA/MPAA lawyers.
The way I see it, I used to be a fundamentalist Young-Eath Creationist and anti-homosexual equality advocate. Now I am a scientific minded, non religious, quasi-liberal. I don't want my old content viewable by ANYone who wishes to do me harm by it. Not sure if I have a legal standing, but if they would at least offer, as Google does, the ability to have your old content removed form their publicly displayed database, then I would be okay with that.
OJ
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
The way I see it, I used to be a fundamentalist Young-Earth Creationist and anti-homosexual equality advocate. Now I am a scientific minded, non religious, quasi-liberal. I don't want my old content viewable by ANYone who wishes to do me harm by it. Not sure if I have a legal standing, but if they would at least offer, as Google does, the ability to have your old content removed form their publicly displayed database, then I would be okay with that.
OJ
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
An interesting point has been overlooked... the Wayback machine only stores the HTML text.... when you pull up an old page in the wayback machine (per the example), the other elements of the page (particularly the graphical elements) are pulled from the *current* web site by the browser, not the internet archive.... The Wayback Machine does not store graphics, only text.
/
The "92 Instances" cited were not the Internet Archive retrieving the graphics, but the person at the Law firm using a browser.
That person at the law firm is -not- a robot, so any theory about robots.txt having any legal significance is just plain wrong.
Just testing it now, the IA system did pull robots.txt at the time I asked to see the archived page. Whether it then uses that as a basis to refuse to pull up an archived HTML file may be another question, but at least at the time of this incident, blocking the page didn't happen...
[Again, I understand and in fact posted in another story that robots.txt has no legal significance, at least as of today)
Perhaps we need an expanded REP, adding different types of usage:
User-agent: *
Disallow-in-Lawsuits:
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
what you said was what i was trying to say but i guess i did not do as well.. the law firm sends tapes in every few months and stuff.. it gives them also a record of how long the repair had been sitting there after the city was notified... all this was in a daily news article a few years back.. i culdnt locate the article.
My old site (www.pilotlibrary.org) used to be in the wayback machine but now is listed as "blocked by robots.txt" - the bizarre thing is that the name has apparently been taken by a cybersquatter!
Clear, Dark Skies
If I keep my temp files, and IA keeps their copy, and the primary restriction is "thou shalt not copy" (before you even get to the "redistribute" part), then it seems reasonable enough, but in a legal sense, definitely not fair.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Can I quote your post in a book and sell it to make millions upon millions of dollars? (This request has been released under the GPL. Do with it as you see fit, just credit the author.)
"Pi is exactly 3!" *gasp*
I've been wondering if the issue isn't simpler than all of this legal wrangling? What I mean is that, whatever has happened all throughout history, we only have 1) evidence of things through artifacts, interpreted by those who find and study them, and 2) the written word, by those who research, then try to wrap up "facts" in a coherant package.
Technology such as the internet archive now exists to automatically, systematically, and rather thoroughly store very specific artifacts (old web pages). These artifacts happen to also be the written word. The complication is that much of that written word (that the legal system and corporations care about) is propaganda which, by its very nature, is not 100% true. What is true from a historical perspective, though, is that it existed as a part of the Internet/WWW which, in turn, is a huge part of our society and culture.
So do we view it in the context of an accurate historical representation of a body of knowledge that existed at a given snapshot of time, which is a decent encapsulated version of "truth," which is theoretically what a good justice system should be rooted in? Or, do we blatantly use outmoded, weasel-ish legal wranglings to suppress what is, indeed, truth that is relevant to deciding a given court case?
If we choose the latter, what does that say about the integrity of our justice system?
A notice like that is unenforcable in just about any country. Even in the UK where I live, you're allowed to make transitory copies for the sole purpose of using something in its intended fashion, which the copies in your temp folder come under. (The internet archive would probably be illegal over here, but it's not in our jurisdiction afaik.) In the US with fair use rights copyright doesn't really cover personal copies at all. Copyright covers a large number of things, it's not as simple as just controlling permission to copy.
I am trolling
There are at least a couple of things that I'm now wondering about:
Jesus, where does this sort of thing end? (I'm speaking rhetorically; I don't know that Jesus actually reads Slashdot.)
By putting something on the Web, you are putting it in a public place where anyone who wants to can look at it, store a copy in their heads, tell friends about it later, even take a picture of it and look at it later if they want. If it's information that you have to be authenticated to get access to in the first place, I guess I can see why that would be different. But if any random web user has access to it, what the fuck is the deal with then suing someone because they cached a copy and make it available to others?
IA-intensely-NAL, but isn't there a meatspace legal principle that people in a brightly lit public place have no reasonable expectation of privacy? Can't any random passerby take my picture on a public street without fear of being sued? How is this different?
When information is kept in your safe, or desk drawer, or other private location, it's yours and you can control what happens to it. As soon as you put that information on posters and plaster the city with it (or put it on TV, or stick it on a web page), in a public place, it's out now. It's escaped, it's Out There, the cat is out of the bag, the horse has bolted, and other metaphors. If this is a problem for someone, they ought not make that information publically available. Seems fair enough to me.
And instead of going to the hospital, you promptly go to Slashdot and post your story in an article about copyright law.
What's more important? Health, or fame? A man has got to have his priorities...
It's somewhat reminiscent of this:
<Opcode> i was gonna call 911...but i was downloading a file
It's different when you start redistributing. You can take your own cached copy, fine, but when you give copies to others, that's something entirely different.
When information is kept in your safe, or desk drawer, or other private location, it's yours and you can control what happens to it. As soon as you put that information on posters and plaster the city with it (or put it on TV, or stick it on a web page), in a public place, it's out now. It's escaped, it's Out There, the cat is out of the bag, the horse has bolted, and other metaphors. If this is a problem for someone, they ought not make that information publically available. Seems fair enough to me.
If you believe that, do you believe no one can copyright anything they publish? As soon as you release that book or song or whatever, you can't do anything if people decide to make and sell copies, put it on posters, perhaps falsely claim authorship, and so on? Because that seems to be what you're suggesting. According to law, not only do you keep the copyright, but you don't even count as having published it, when you broadcast something on TV or say it loudly in public. It should be the same on the Web.
I am trolling
Admittedly this is a little late, but I just came across caselaw that exactly on point.
0 2728.shtml
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets/vol_2_no_3/0
Internet Archive's Web Page Snapshots Held Admissible as Evidence The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit effort to preserve Internet sites and other digital media and make them available online.
IA's spiders regularly crawl the World Wide Web, making copies of web pages and storing them permanently in an enormous digital archive. Using the "Wayback Machine", one of the Archive's popular services, users can input the address of a web page and call up a series of dated copies, allowing them to see what the page contained at the times it was accessed by the IA spider.
Polska is the American provider of TV Polonia, a Polish-language television channel. According to its pleadings in the case, it had reached a deal with EchoStar, which operates the Dish Network satellite TV service, to provide TV Polonia to Dish Network. The contract included marketing rights, giving EchoStar the right to use Polska's trademarks to sell subscriptions to its television service. The deal was scheduled to expire in stages: absent a renewal, EchoStar's marketing rights would expire in April of 2001, and programming would stop a year afterwards. The deal was not renewed, and Polska alleges that EchoStar continued to use the "TV Polonia" name to market its satellite service after its rights to exploit that trademark had expired. EchoStar pointed out that Polska seemed to have no problem with advertisements stating that TV Polonia could be found on the Dish Network, since Polska had one on its own website after the expiration of marketing rights. EchoStar offered IA snapshots dated to various times in 2001 as proof of the past content of Polska's website. As part of a series of motions in limine, Polska attempted to suppress the snapshots on the grounds of hearsay and unauthenticated source.
Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska's assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska's objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.
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