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Wayback Machine Safe, Settlement Disappointing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-me-out-of-here-mr-wizard dept.

Jibbanx writes "Healthcare Advocates and the Internet Archive have finally resolved their differences, reaching an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. The suit stemmed from HA's anger over the Wayback Machine showing pages archived from their site even after they added a robots.txt file to their webserver. While the settlement is good for the Internet Archive, it's also disappointing because it would have tested HA's claims in court. As the article notes, you can't really un-ring the bell of publishing something online, which is exactly what HA wanted to do. Obeying robots.txt files is voluntary, after all, and if the company didn't want the information online, they shouldn't have put it there in the first place."

1 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I sense a little two-faced opinion here by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Another example: someone I know wrote an essay that he thought only people in his class would ever see. It contained one or two mildly embaressing disclosures, not terribly personal, but not something you'd want a complete stranger to know about you. Some idiot put it up on the school web site without his permission.

    Here's a nasty possibility. Suppose somebody unintentionally publishes information useful to terrorists. DHS drops by and points out the error, and the information is withdrawn. Does Wayback Machine have a right to keep the information online?

    In fact, Wayback Machine has never asserted their right to keep anything online. As the article points out, they'll remove stuff that's noncompliant with the current robots.txt, even though it was compliant at the time it was spidered. This lawsuit wasn't about their right keep stuff online. It was just somebody accusing them of being negligent about enforcing their own policies.