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."

Comments

metaphorically speaking

[nizo]

... you can't really un-ring the bell of publishing something online...

For the life of me I can't figure out what ringing a bell and publishing something online have in common. Maybe if we didn't use digital clocks we could turn back the sands of time and use a different mixed metaphor instead?

Re:Autolawyers

[Doc Ruby]

You said

so far it seems the third branch of the government is pretty good at disagreeing with the first two. /I'm sure I'm gonna get some liberal to jump on this and argue about recent appointments and such and such

.

Then you said

I think its become fairly obvious by now that "liberal" judges are ones that use the constitution to say things we've been doing all along were bad. While "conservative" judges are ones that use the constitution to say things we've just started doing are bad.

When I specified recent crimes which "Conservative" judges say are OK, you said

And you think these things are new in war??? HAHA.

You're obviously a "Conservative". You obviously prefer "Conservative" judges. You obviously think that "Conservative" judges are more likely than "liberals" think to "disagree" with the rest of the government. They're not, and they're more dangerous. And you're grinding your ax while hiding it behind your back, under judges' robes, in true Conservative fashion.

When you have a neutral position, I'll argue it in neutral terms, unless you're denying the highly unbalanced context of the issue. You won't catch me helping pretend that Conservative judges aren't activists, especially when they are tacit activists ignoring the crimes of fellow "Conservatives".

The Internet lesson is that you can say something to someone who won't play along with the denial that people in a familiar echo chamber will play. You just might learn something new.