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Wayback Machine Safe, Settlement Disappointing

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. unringing the bell? by hguorbray · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Good thing this isn't anything to do with the Bush Administration -else they'd have retroactively classified all this stuff as 'Top Secret' and then charged the Wayback machine of Treason under the Patriot act ....

    and then the machine would find itself held without trial or charges in Gitmo until it turned to rust.

    Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying.....Hopefully you're laughing at this