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Archive.org Sued By Colorado Woman
An anonymous reader writes "The Internet Archive is being sued by a Colorado woman for spidering her site. Suzanne Shell posted a notice on her site saying she wasn't allowing it to be crawled. When it was, she sued for civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act. A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim. If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."
...you agree not to mod me down for being First Post!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Did she post the notice properly, though? There are laws about how you must post a 'no trespassing' sign on physical properties.
Similarly, there are ways to post that notice on your website as well. robots.txt comes to mind. If she didn't bother to post the notice correctly, the case should be just thrown out.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
she should have put a password on it.
I Hate Allan
TFA clearly states that there was no robots.txt file. I suppose she expects us (programmers) to rush out and perfect natural language processing so all our spiders can read her stupid notice.
Maybe I'm new here, as you can see from my slashdotid.
But *WHY* in hell would someone want to have their site excluded from search engines, and archive.org?
It's not like she's being deprived.
And even if they did, why the fuck didn't she use a ROBOTS.TXT file? Isn't that what it's for?
Stupid bitch.
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
isn't there something like robots.txt which contain rules for what aprt of the site a robot is allowed to crawl?
The article states that a crawler can't read, but they can -- robots.txt.
--
Franklin Brauner
http://www.profane-justice.org/
In the early fight against spam, there were a number of automatic replies that stated if the sender continued to send email messages to the address, that they are agreeing to a "Handling and Reading Fee" of some amount. I still occasionally see it.
I think the bigger question that needs to be asked is how will someone prove they own the site? An email confirmation with an opt-in button won't do it. I could submit someone else's site. They can't force it to webmaster@example.com because not everyone uses a webmaster@ account, nor do people always use the same domain name for email and web.
I've got my own little spider project http://www.linkplan.net/ in the works, and something like this tends to make me want to rethink that whole little project...
Guess this is one I'll have to watch closely.
--- http://www.keything.com
This appears to be it.
Oh, and Ms. Shell, 1996 called. They want their website design back.
PS - By clicking on the link above you are agreeing to all the stuff Ms. Shell posted on her site.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
It would actually be nice if when you decided to take something down off the web, it was gone forever. How many embarrassing photos and postings have we written over the years? There's something about people being able to google or way-back-machine your past that's makes you feel *exposed*.
I often wonder about all those girls that are nude on the web -- aren't they going to grow up and wish all that stuff would be taken down?
Still, that's life -- once it's out there, it's out there. The lady in the story doesn't (or shouldn't) have a chance.
Does this make her the most hated person on the Internet now? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/22 20210
why she doesn't want any references to her website for the future.
If you check out her website at http://www.profane-justice.org/, you'd wish you were blind.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Is it just me or is this a bit like having a sign saying "Trespassers will be shot" on the INSIDE of your house?
Hop to it, Slashdot:
http://www.profane-justice.org/
robots.txt? NOARCHIVE?
People should have to take an exam or at least an IQ test before being allowed near a computer, Women doubly so
Cases like this are good for the Internet because they have the opportunity to officially set the rules so little guys don't have to be worried about being sued. And, sure, some idiot court could say that her rights were violated, but I'd suspect at that point some group of companies with a combined trillions of dollars will enter the case and it would be overturned.
It would be great if robots.txt somehow got the force of law. A lot of stupid lawsuits would go away.
Quote from her website in the "contract" notice (bold is my emphasis): "The content if this web site is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to archive, copy, print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein."
Since the wording of the contract is wrong, the entire contract should be null and void.
If anybody had bothered to look at the web site in question, they'd instantly see that this woman is a real crackpot. I can't even figure out what in the hell her web site is about. She obviously has some serious mental issues. This case simply can't be taken seriously.
I don't respond to AC's.
so i don't see what the problem is, other than this woman's ignorance.
' If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."'
No that would only change the nature of the web for US citizens, just like the online internet gamble thingie, the rest of us will shrug and move about our businesses as usual.
I'm not in Colorado, so I don't know their particular statute of frauds, but in general it requires a contract, signed, in writing for things over $500. Since, according to the contract on the bottom, one page is worth $5,000, I would argue they need my signature to imply that I agreed to the contract. Also, basic contract law requires a meeting of the minds and an agreement. There isn't one with a crawler. Finally, I don't think you can eliminate fair use rights in the manner that she is doing. That's a basic part of the law. She's trying to extend copyright in a manner that definitely isn't settled, and may have sufficient precedence against to make this a forgone conclusion. I hope that the judge didn't dismiss the claim so that he can establish some precedent on the matter, showing how stupid it is, and prevent future law suits of the same kind.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
It appears her site is at http://www.profane-justice.org/
s e456.cfm
Check out this article here: http://www.phillipsnizer.com/library/cases/lib_ca
According to this, she requested that the site be removed from the Archive in December, 2005, and they complied. They're actually countersuing her. They moved to have her claims dropped for various reasons, but the court chose to only drop the ones related to conversion, civil theft and the RICO claims. The issue of breach of contract and copyright infringement still apply.
I think it's absolutely ridiculous that this can go forward, especially when there are two established methods to stop the Archive's activity: The opt-out, which will remove history, and robots.txt (which she didn't use and appears to still not use), which will prevent that spider from ever archiving her site again.
Her site shows up in Google, I wonder why she hasn't sued them? Could it be that she likes the exposure of the big search engine, but doesn't want any history of her site archived by the Internet Archive?
It's called a robots.txt file, and all reputable webcrawlers/search engines respect it. We don't yet have the technology to read arbitrary exclusion notices posted in English, but we do have a widely used machine-readable standard for requesting that your pages not be indexed. If the person in question was so adamant about her site not being crawled, she should have spent the 5 minutes needed to read up on robots.txt.
It seems like a matter of fair use to me. Looking at every web site and making word indexes is almost certainly fair use. But making exact copies and redistributing them is not fair use. She wrote the content, and therefore she owns it. Putting it on the web implicitly gives you the right to look at it, but not to give it to others.
Potentially, it deprives her of ad-based revenue, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that she owns it and should have something to say about who gets to distribute it. She can't retract something she said; if it's embarrassing then it's out there. But to have somebody else using her content for another purpose just feels wrong to me.
Maybe I'm behind the times in terminology, but I think of "spidering" as looking at every web page by following links. That's not the same as making and distributing exact copies. (Is "crawling" any different from "spidering"?)
Archive.org should work the same way YouTube does: if she sends in a notice saying that she doesn't want her site mirrored there, then they should take it down. Along with a snarky note about how if she'd just put a robots.txt file there in the first place, she wouldn't have this problem.
Since one has to read the home page of her site to read this "contract notice", the site has already been entered. Thus the contract terms are already invalid. Its not like you are posting a notice on the outside of your house. In order to see the home page, the webserve has to serve up index.html or default.htm. There is no distinction between serving up the home page, which is already on the *inside* of the site, and serving up any other content file on the inside of the site, at least from the top level directory of the website. It would be more like posting a sign on the *inside* of your house saying "If you have entered this house, you are now in a contract." And further, having a mechanism in which, if a passerby knocked on the front door, the door automatically opens and the passerby is shoved into the inside, immediately forcing the passerby into a contract.
The only distinction between serving up index.html or default.htm and the rest of the website is the *convention* that index.html is the home page. Well, following the robots.txt rules for controlling spidering is another *convention* that is every bit as much a part of the innate SOP of building a website as posting index.html.
If she had really wanted to construct a contract making a distinction between "entering" and not entering, she needed to put a password (.htaccess) on the top level directory so that the webserver would not automatically serve up parts of the website without some form of mutual agreement.
I'm actually asking. B/c as I see it, this will only effect sites physically located in Colorado. For that matter, even if US federal law made this possible, how would this effect any site outside of the US?
Seems to me that there's more than just a little bit of hubris going on in the assumption of how far this ruling will reach.
Because I don't agree to this:
--QUOTED IN PART WITH FAIR USE--
IF YOU COPY OR DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING ON THIS WEB SITE, YOU ARE ENTERING INTO A CONTRACT. SEE COPYRIGHT NOTICE & SECURITY AGREEMENT (READ BEFORE ACCESSING THIS WEBSITE) - Copyright 1996- 2007, Suzanne Shell and individual contributors where appropriate. The content if this web site is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to archive, copy, print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein.
Reproduction and distribution prohibited without permission. This web site is licensed to be viewed on a computer only.Permission and limited, non-exclusive license to reproduce this web site, by any method including but not limited to magnetically, digitally, electronically or hard copy, may be purchased for $5,000 (five thousand dollars) per printed hard copy page per copy, in advance of printing. We accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, check, money order or cash. WE DO NOT ACCEPT GOVERNMENT PO'S - this fee schedule specifically applies to any state agency, employee, contractor or CP$ service provider or any person listed on American Family Advocacy Center Bad Advocates pages. CP$ agencies and coconspirators have found this site to be extremely valuable, preferring the contents of this site to any other site. Hence, the premium price. Family Rights activists or advocates may obtain reduction or waiver of license fees upon request.
All online purchases are nonrefundable. In the case of a dispute involving a purchase, the purchaser agrees that the record of electronic delivery generated by the online document delivery service shall constitute incontrovertible proof that the item charged was delivered to an authorized user of the credit card or online payment service account. If the card owner contests the charge the document was delivered and we are charged fees for a charge back, cardholder agrees to pay to us the amount of the purchase plus $50 or double the purchase price, whichever is greater, upon demand.
If this intellectual property is stolen, infringed or used to harm any member or associate family of any Family Rights group, the copyright holder will seek appropriate remedies under applicable laws. Anyone visiting this site consents to jurisdiction and venue remaining in El Paso County, Colorado.
--QUOTED IN PART WITH FAIR USE--
Not to be a technical smart-ass, but everyone with a modern browser with default settings makes an electronic copy of her website every time they visit (in their memory cache immediately and their disk cache shortly thereafter.) If the system doesn't have enough physical memory to keep everything in ram, it might even get dumped to swap. Making it possible to have a round total of 3 copies without even trying. Since she hasn't sued every visitor one could argue she's given up her right to do so.
Also, I don't agree to something simply by reading it. I have to indicate it (see: Electronic Signature) in a legally binding manner. And the 1996-era pop-up (that does no checking to prevent me from clicking no and continuing) certainly doesn't constitute a legal agreement.
Sounds like someone just wants to make a buck through the legal system.
dsshell@ix.netcom.com
wget -r -l0 --delete-after http://www.profane-justice.org/
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Ms. Sue Happy?
Ok so lets say the judge rules in her favor. Would it be so difficult if robots.txt becomes opt-in. Meaning the no robots.txt equals no spiders. If you want your website on a search engine you have to put in a robots.txt. It would alter the equation for sure, but things would continue working.
"If Shell prevails... Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search."
For the better.
As clichéd as the g-phrase has become, people that don't want Google to index their sites just don't "get it", and we're better off without them. The internet is a new system that is profoundly more co-operative than any built before. (I say this in the context of all modern culture, which could not have been built without consistently high levels of co-operation for millennia.) I hate leaving anyone behind, but we all have to choose, we all have only 24 hours in a day, and I'd rather work with those people who believe in working together.
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
Nothing to see. Move on. And if that does not help, anything which is not online cannot be "craweld"...
She is a stupid person. Bring us back to first principles about the Web and connecting information. Please.
If she does win the case there will the opt-in will probably just go in robots.txt The same place where she should have put her opt-out.
Call it, then replay a message including:
"If you don't agree, say 'NO', otherwise we consider you agree to our contract."
[short silence]
"Thank you. You have agreed to our terms and conditions. We will send you the invoice in..."
(and proceed.)
Since agreement to her conditions is supposed to be implied by a visit of a second party, human or not, agreement from side of the second party, human or not, containing correct reply (or correct lack of thereof - implied consent like in case of her license) is just as valid legally.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I went to www.profane-justice.org and clicked the "copyright" link. I get a OK/Cancel clickthrough stating "I agree to this site's terms of use and purchase" (in first person, no period, and not in question format). Not wanting to pay $5000, I click "Cancel". So then the site tells me "Entry onto this page or clicking on any document link indicates your express agreement to terms of use and purchase." And then it sends me to the page anyway! IANAL, but I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with that series of events.
I find it interesting how information is used selectively here. She is cast as the victim in the second and third paragraphs, with the standard foster home sob story. She was supposedly a wonderful person, but then we find, buried in parentheses a paragraph later, the bolded text above. Hmm, pregnant...cheerleader...
It also looks like her own kids reported her for child abuse and went to live with their father, and she's pretty ticked about that.
She wonders why she's disliked by the court system. Well, the evidence is all over the article:
And look how effective she is! Heck, this belongs on Fark not Slashdot.
I particularly like the place where the site says "Why can't I print this." I clicked through to see what the reason was (they seem to want a pile of money - $5000 - for every page printed since the site is "so valuable"). The claim was that they'd disabled the print and copy functionality on the page, but firefox had no trouble at all producing a print preview page (though their style sheets are broken so it doesn't render correctly). Nor did firefox have any trouble saving a copy. And I had no problems viewing the source. I didn't try wget, but suspect it works nicely (really, it must, since they're complaining about spidering).
That they also have a recommendation (on their "problems" page) that you disable virus protection "for this site only" is just further evidence of something odd somewhere.
Use the NO ROBOTS Meta tag and also, there is even a GOOGLEBOT Meta tag to prevent your page from being stored.
Bryan
Check out her current robots.txt file.
I wish I could sue this woman for inane stupidity. Seriously, when I was 12 I made a website, and it had robots.txt. Sure, for no particular reason, but it had the file. If this woman overlooks a simple web protocol that a 12 year old can understand and implement, how can she hope to offer advise in anything online? And for that matter, the site is an eyesore.
By putting material on the web, it is understood that any publicly accessible material is copied multiple times every time the page is viewed. The ISPs get it, the browser gets it, the disk cache gets it, the user reads it. The internet is a *protocol* for copying data. To put a silly notice with insane demands at the bottom of the page is not simply futile, but laughably ridiculous. To sue over having content copied from a webserver (which to put it in terms that she might understand is basically like a public photocopier with her webpages permanently installed for every passerby to simply push *copy* and read the material) is like suing people for having a picture of that happens to have your billboard in the background. You put the data out to be seen, but as soon as it's not exactly where you want it, you get angry.
Above and beyond that, it is clear that Archive.org is not trying to steal her profit. You can opt out. You can tell it not to archive in the first place. You can even make a simple script that blocks access to the rest of the site until you click "I agree" to the terms. None of these solutions would take more than 5 minutes.
No robots.txt
i live in denver and i've heard of this lady. she's an abuse survivor who really should be heavily medicated and in a treatment program, but instead we, the public, get to deal with her crazy bipolar ass doing shit like this. it's funny, if you break your arm or get hit in the face with someones cat, you go see a doctor...but if you've got any sort of brain disorder, it musn't be talked about as a motivator for doing crazy things...things like suing the owners of a web index without doing anything to prevent your shit from being indexed. it's like running out in to the middle of a busy street and then getting pissed the fuck off when you get hit, because you were holding a sign that said "if you run my dumb ass over, you're entering into a contract..."
If she didn't want it crawled, she should have used robots.txt. If she didn't do that, then how could she possibly claim to have notified anyone about the contract?
You can't create a contract just by claiming you have one.
Because just by viewing her site, my web browser saved a cached copy!
...and he wants his web site back.
Put a form between your visitors and the content... a terms of use agreement... and set a cookie when they check the box and hit 'I Agree' then show the content.
If the cookie isn't present on a visitors machine, redirect any page request to the terms of use form page. This will enforce your terms for both webcrawlers (who can't submit a form) and for people (whom will have to submit the form to see the content) but won't be a terrible inconvenience for them.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
She clearly did it so she could sue someone and make money.
Quoted:
IF YOU COPY OR DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING ON THIS WEB SITE, YOU ARE ENTERING INTO A CONTRACT. SEE COPYRIGHT NOTICE & SECURITY AGREEMENT (READ BEFORE ACCESSING THIS WEBSITE) - Copyright 1996- 2007, Suzanne Shell and individual contributors where appropriate. The content if this web site is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to archive, copy, print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein.
Which of course implies this is a commercial website.
However, if you go to the contact info page, we can see her PGP key (...) contains:
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP 8.1 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com
GG?
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
robots.txt is standardized and works. Whowever does not know this is incompetent and deserves what they get. Free-form notices are obviously not a technical solution and can only be applied to manual crawling by human beings.
;egal system that allows this is badly broken.
In addition, this ''breach of conreact'' is completely stupid. Put anything on port 80 allows everybody and everything to request it via HTTP. There is no contract involved, and you cannot add one. If you can, then the
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
IANAL but I think this wouldn't work because you can't enter into a contract that involves illegal activity, and running someone's "dumb ass over" is illegal.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
You know, for slander, libel and such and doesn't want her own web page used against herself in the court of law. A web page such a archive.org would be an invaluable tool against her, I bet.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
First, the site deals with helping those accused of child molestation. Second, archive.org removed her site when she requested it. Third, archive.org sued her for declaratory judgment of noninfringement when she demanded payment of $10,000. She countersued for RICO violations, etc. The judge shot all of those down except for the contract law claim and expressed doubt about the viability of that one. So, yes, extremely high kook factor. This would be a non-story but for the pervasive legal illiteracy on /.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"...The content if this web site is intended to generate income..." so by my definition it's a commercial website. but then we see: "Version: PGP 8.1 - not licensed for commercial use" yeah, whatever..
Lets forget for a second the person suing Internet Archive. Lets also forget the quality of her website and that she may or may not have included a proper robots.txt file.
Suppose you're a teenager or college student. You do some silly prank and it includes a picture of yourself and your friends. You tell your friend you don't want the picture going on the net. For whatever reason, he/she posts it up anyways. Nothing illegal. Or suppose the names of a doctor's patients were to leak onto the Internet. Or that you're a company and an ex-employee posts information that is defamous or incorrect about your company. Or that you post an angry rant on the net, you've grown past it and then delete from your site. In all cases, wouldn't some or all this information be cached on Google or Internet Archive?
My point is we're all human. Wether our activities are simpy stupid, embarassing, or could affect a company's ability to do business, some or all of us have said or done some of these things. It could affect our relations and our ability to find work. The problem with the Net is its very easy to find this information and it becomes widespread. We've all embarassed ourselves, at the least. We can sue the person responsible for posting the information. But it is, as I understand, very difficult to have the information removed from caches on search engine and archive sites.
Rather than sue, sue, sue, shouldn't there be an easier way to remove this information?
Her email is
dsshell@ix.netcom.com
Quite frankly, I hate your American hobby if suing everyone. She reminds me of that woman that sued Google for kicking her out of Adsense after shit generated revenue by clicking her own ads.
My Starcraft 2 Blog
and say it was in fear of getting sued by her. End of story and her website traffic. She got what she wanted.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Learn 2 Use robots.txt
Next case.
Are Here and her site in question is here.
Somewhat stupidly she has an 825KB JPEG at the top of the page, it seems as though she isn't too bright and has used 100% quality and is simply resizing it to a lower res in the browser. (actual image size is 2880x659, she's resizing it in the html to 1032x208)
Plus, i've seen better things than that site in my toilet after a particularly spicy dinner.
I think this is a case of somebody who is totally ignorant of pretty much everything internet wise, the lack of knowledge put into the site design, images etc. Indicates such.
I would be simple with PHP. The index.html page should be the contract obligation, and a PHP script which sets a cookie or adds a identifier in the URL if the contract is accepted. Then the pages should check for the cookie or URL identifier before displaying the content. She should also have a simple robots.txt file and meta tags to keep crawlers away. If she is a freaked out about security as her contact us page says (it says to assume their phones are tapped and to use encrypted email), she could at least take some steps to protect her content.
Although she is protected from illicit copying by US copyright laws, there are several clauses in her contract that would probably be unenforceable in court. Her return policy allowing her to demand double the purchase price back if the charge is contested is most definitely invalid. Also, attempting to prove that the user gave away some of his rights (to contest charges, to settle in the jurisdiction of El Paso, etc...) by merely viewing the page (even if the user didn't scroll down to the contract) is legally wrong. Software companies have issues with getting user consent by clicking a button, but viewing a page takes this way out of legality.
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
Would it be worthwhile for this to go to court to get a ruling on it? Would there be any application to SLA's? it seems like the crux of this issue is whether or not you can enter into a contract blind by opening the website, or something like that. I also wonder about caching - what about networks (AOL for example) that use a caching system/proxy server to provide more efficient data to their users?
I suspect a win for the website owner here would turn a lot of the systems we currently use on it's ear.....
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Archive.org crawler isn't a heavy traffic for a site, is just as a regular surfer who surfs to every page. Like she can't sue a surfer which comes to a site and surf in every page and saves every page, she can't sue Archive.org.
A theft? How can gaining information which is given to anyone, a theft?
All she's trying to do, in my opinion, is not to gain any right or justice, but gaining money! $$$.
AND that makes me sick!
An excerpt from the Terms and Conditions:
User is debtor and Suzanne Shell is Copyright owner, and where in User pledges all of User's assets, land, consumer goods, farm products, inventory, money, gold, silver, diamonds, investment property, commercial tort claims, letters of credit, letter-of-credit rights, chattel paper, instruments, deposit accounts, documents, and general intangibles, and all of User's interest in all such foregoing property, now owned and hereafter acquired, now existing and hereafter arising, and wherever located, as collateral for securing User's contractual obligation in favor of Copyright owner for User's unauthorized use of Copyright owner's copyrighted property
If I read that correctly, if you do not follow the insane 'contract', all your stuffs are belong to her? I may be off on the translation of her legaleses...
- not the way the web is with search engines.
I would in fact like the idea - no robots.txt - no crawling. You create one, that means you want to talk to "robots" (crawlers)
and instruct them what to do.
So all this nonsense would stop. If you are technically not able - do not run a web site. If you are - use robots.txt.
Of course it does not work because of morons. So just flip the rule around.
Announce it, give 2 months of grace period, then stop crawling sites with no robots.txt. SOOOOO EASY!
1. Helping other people use your copyrighted material (cliff's notes, google search)
2. Historical research: wayback machine
Suzanne Shell is a family rights activists who has published 3 books and a website advocating on behalf of the fundamental human right of family association. This activism largely applies to government intrusions into the family under child abuse/neglect investigations and court actions. She has been active in this arena since 1991 and is nationally recognized as an expert in this arena.
She is advertised by: http://www.profane-justice.org/
An example of her work: http://www.profane-justice.org/sctcomplnt.pdf
She urges interested parties to contact her via her contact address or phone number on the letterhead in above PDF.
Let her know what you think!
Zey do Nussing!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
http://www.profane-justice.org/
Jesus! Just reading her site makes me think she suffers from MASSIVE Bi-Polar disorder. It's clearly biased crap (albeit about a good issue). The fact that she's attempting to sue archive.org is hilarious as well; considering you are technically required to ACCEPT the contract before you even see it.
Gold digging. Pure and simple; this bitch is pissed at the world; and apparently thinks the world owes her a great debt. Her "legal notice" looks suspiciously copy/pasted/edited as well. I wonder if she'll pay the person she stole it from $250,000 for using it.
Of course, I'm afraid to quote her hilarious tag line for her contract; as I may get sued because I'm sure once she's seen how much we're ragging on her she's going to retaliate.
She also lives in a world where email apparently never get lost either; and if it does, you have to pay again! Or if you contest the charges on your card after not recieving the mail; she demands DOUBLE the initial price. HILARIOUS!
seems like this shouldn't be much of a big deal. Just as there is a robots.txt file to keep bots out, if Shell wins in court, this shouldn't require much more than a line of code in the main html of web pages to allow bots.
The ruling could not be grandfathered, so all that should happen is that Google require the opt-in code for all sites that have not been indexed by its spiders, something that web page creators/providers can even default into the main html. All of those who wish not to be indexed whose sites originated previous to the ruling would have the same robots.txt file restriction applied, while those who create webpages after the ruling either put in the opt-in code or don't.
This is a pretty inconsequential case, IMO.
From this article:
[Her] oldest son, Jacob, accused her second husband of child abuse. Dennis Shell had spanked his thirteen-year-old stepson with a martinet, a kind of cat-o'-nine-tails with leather straps, after an argument during which the boy yelled at him... Shell says she witnessed the spanking, which was Jacob's first in nearly a year. "I didn't feel eight swats were excessive, given his age, his size, and his offense,"
Her son was taken away and placed into foster care. She's advocating for a parents right to abuse their children. Spanking is one thing but a cat-o-nine-tails? I hope this woman ends up in jail.
Huge number of sites hosted in US + big 3 SEs follow US laws + ruling that would affect US SEs and sites = you should care. Not everything that happens to the US affects other countries, but when it's something from the US that they use then of course it effects them. Unless you're tired of using Google to find sites in the US.
Of course, even in the remote case that she won, I think the real outcome would be that she inconveniences 100,000's of webmasters that now have to specifically opt in, and really who hosts public content and doesn't want the attention of Google et al?
But back to you, US-centrist thinking can be annoying, I'll grant, but you _do_ make use of American goods and services, and their treatment by US law does affect you.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Her site is also indexed by google, search for her name and it's the first result. Why isn't she suing google?
The site is also poorly designed, and looks like crap in safari. She's clearly not competent enough to create a properly html compliant site, nor to create a robots.txt file. If you know so little about how the web works, you really shouldnt be creating websites, and certainly shouldnt be trying to screw with other people.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20070317/tc_cmp/198001 674
"Her suit asserts that the Internet Archive's programmatic visitation of her site constitutes acceptance of her terms, despite the obvious inability of a Web crawler to understand those terms and the absence of a robots.txt file to warn crawlers away."
I am totally hoping she gets nailed.. wow.
Storm
One relevant issue in contract law is a meeting of the minds. Given that there was only one "mind" involved, I think the strongest way that Archive.org has to address this is to say that there is no mind to be met, and therefore no contract to be breached.
If I hang a sign on my door saying "Do Not Enter" and attaching a contract below, does that give me the right to not only go after someone for breaking and entering (which is pursued in a criminal court under a standard of reasonable doubt) but also in civil court for breach of contract (which is pursued in a civil court under a much lower standard of judgment? That would seem convenient to me, but I think it would be argued that there was more of a burden to creating that contract than merely placing it. You'd have to show that the person read it and understood it. There's probably some case law on this in audio contracts when spammers leave messages on your answering machine, and maybe it doesn't break down as I'm imagining, but then, audio is linear and you have to listen past the "contract" in many cases to leave a message. Web pages are notoriously designed on the belief that the reader will be there only a few seconds, reading only parts of the page, so showing that the presence of the text implies knowledge of and agreement to a contract seems farfetched.
Part of the case may hinge on the question of whether the expectation is that there would be a human reader there at all. In the early days of the net, that might have been a reasonable assumption. But reasonable expectations are an evolving notion, and if the web site owner can be shown to reasonably know of the existence of web spiders, it's reasonable to suppose they knew that the spiders are machines, and that machines don't understand English. So the failure to ask around and find out about ROBOTS.TXT or the equivalent web tags might be construed to mean that they didn't do the work necessary to ensure the presence of a contract with a mechanical entity.
The Internet Archive may be in a special situation because it shows pages from times other than modern times and so some of those pages may have been collected under a different "prevailing expectation". I'm not sure how that would influence things, but it seems relevant.
Note that I have previously argued in other forums that in cases of copyright, the burden is on the copier, not the person being copied, to make the steps to complete the connection. However, this is not a case about copyright. This is a case about contract law. Copyright would seem the stronger way to pursue this, especially if the pages were duly registered with the copyright office. Because copyright requies the entity copying to receive affirmative permission. But contract law seems weak to me here because it seems implicit in the entire doctrine of copyright that you have to have had affirmative knowledge on both sides to have a contract at all, much less to breach it.
On my web pages where I've wanted to engage in copying language, what I've done is to assume that the copyright forbids copying at the outset, and then to make any contractual material part of the granted licenses of use. This is the lever the GPL uses, too, I believe, since otherwise people might claim never to have read the license. But they can't use the work at all without having read the license. So such placement allows one to constructively assume that someone has read the contract, since presumably they wouldn't be copying your work at all unless they read the conditions under which they were allowed to. So that kind of detail might matter, too. In her case, since she wanted no such conditions of use, she should have just stopped with "All Rights Reserved." and I'd think she would have been all set. Detaching the copyright from the contract loses the strongest available tool she had, in my opinion.
An aside: If I were Google, and if the ethics of it all did not concern me, I might prefer to join with the plaintiff and insist that spi
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
>The real issue is: Is she a superstar in the sack (from having to compensate for her insane personality)?
I don't care, she is a fat, ugly and even dumb. So I will never (even totaly wasted) enjoy here in the sack..
I believe this woman created her site as a honey pot in hopes of filing a lawsuit against an archiving site. Really, who puts of usage contracts like that and then immediately just files a lawsuit instead of requesting a takedown and putting up a robots.txt file? I'm thinking someone who has a plan to cash in a court system that isn't going to understand that which the rest of us see as obvious, that if you don't want your site spidered, you keep the spiders out. Why can't she go after spammers instead?
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
I would remove her website from archive.org. It's just now worth to pollute their servers.
The site's copyright notice states that you can't copy anything on the site. And if you do, you must pay her money before you print it or something. But, my browser copied it to my hard drive. Will she sue me too? That can be solved with a pragma no-cache header, but the site does not use.
There are a couple ways to solve this. You could have a robots.txt file on a web server by default. You could even have a easy-to-use GUI to maintain it. The robots.txt would be defaulted to not let any crawler to the site. Problem solved!
Or web site development tools could automatically create the robots.txt with a dialog box or two as part of the setup. Those same dialogs can also set the pragma no-cache meta tag as well. This idiot proofs the process a little.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
With the abundance of frivolous lawsuits and rampant abuse of broad, poorly conceived devices like RICO and DMCA, I think there should be some way to discourage abusers... a bitch slap of some sort. Ms Shell is in no way an expert on web development and hosting, and consequently has little or no knowledge the Robots.txt standard for directing web spiders. If someone rams into me because I was driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and I have no idea what a one-way street is, does that mean I can sue the other driver ? Contrary to the examples set forth by the Bush administration, ignorance does not grant unlimited rights and powers to the wielder. This woman didn't want to be spidered, she should have learned the proper way to do it. Just because you write a few English words doesn't automatically make them a legally binding contract, especially when the intended parties don't speak or understand English, as is the case with computers.
If I write "I hereby forbid anyone from breathing the air within a 10km radius of my home" in Pig Latin on a sign on my door, and then try to sue everyone who walks down the street without an O2 tank, not only am I going to get thrown out of court, I'm also probably going to have a few hundred people waiting on my doorstep to beat me with said O2 tanks for being such a tard, at the very least I'll be the laughing stock of the neighborhood and people are going to spit in my Big Mac.
To invoke the RICO act and raise charges of organized crime is sheer idiocy... Unless the Archive.org servers somehow threatened to deface her site unless certain dues were paid, then it ain't racketeering. I want this person publicly humiliated and made an example of, as a warning to other court abusers. Hell I'd accuse her of attempted fraud and lock her up with a big hairy butch cellmate. All this legal nonsense is going against progress and wasting public resources in the name of greed. They persist because of the disproportionate payoff vs risk ratio. Sue some company successfully and you can rake in millions of dollars for nothing, lose the case and you walk off with minor legal fees, which can often be twisted into an out-of-court settlement thanks to corporate blackmail. We punish people for tax fraud, retail fraud, accounting fraud... we should be just as harsh regarding court fraud.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Anything made available for human consumption should be equally available for computer consumption. The IP address, location, and method of consumption should be irrelevant. The only thing at issue here should be that her site was made publicly available, and if you make resources publicly available you should fully expect that humans and computers are going to use them.
I think the only fair thing to do is to issue this woman a citation and require technology training classes before she can return to the virtual world. I have no problem with the untrained using our space so long as they don't cause a ruckus. Once the law suits start flying for things they scarcely understand, their presence is not acceptable.
This is kind of interesting, because robots.txt isn't a standard, in the de jure sense, and neither is it issued by a recognised organisation like the IETF or W3C; it's just a thing that people do, really. As such, it may be easier to claim that it
On the other side, RFC2616 says that GET shouldn't have any side effects from the perspective of the client, and entering a contract is certainly a side effect!
As we get more litigious, it seems like protocols in the technical sense will also be protocols in the legal sense. P3P and content ratings systems come to mind as well.
It's about time somone took a stand..
I can see why she wouldn't want to get indexed. She's basically providing information for people trying to resist intervention from child protective services. She suggests taking your children and hiding them out of state if CPS tries to contact you. She also suggests (and sells an ebook about) teaching your children to never talk to a social worker or answer questions... you know like 'does anyone ever hit you?' and 'what did you have to eat yesterday?' and 'do you have a doctor to go to when you are sick?'
Of course CPS and child abuse reporting in general is imperfect. I'm an ER physician which makes me a mandated reporter. This means if I simply suspect abuse or neglect, I am required by law to report it. The system is set up to favor false positives over false negatives. That means that CPS investigates many cases for every real abusive situation they find.
This is NOT a bad thing. There are 1500-2000 reported deaths from child abuse every year in the US. One in twenty kids in the US is physically abused in any given year and most of those victims are under age 6. Most of these cases of abuse never come to the attention of authorities because child abuse is woefully under-reported (which is why we have mandated reporter laws.)
Most of the instances of 'think of the children' posturing are conservative unthinking crap. However advocating outdated ideas of parental property rights over the rights of children to not be abused goes beyond simple whack-job well into the realm of pure evil.
Nick
... which is why she won't prevail.
http://outcampaign.org/
Reality: under your flawed view, Google can't index the web.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Then we need to get the laws changed to explicitly indicate the machine readable protocols (robots.txt) that must be used on the internet to opt out of archives, spiders, and caches. Yes I'm saying that we should put into law the precept that anything put on the internet (or maybe just the web, maybe just http/text/static-images) is in and of itself an explicit act of allowing others to do what google and internet-archive are doing. (How we nicely fit this together with copyright law is an excercise left to the reader - but afaiac how things are in effect working now is fine by me, the only problem is codifying it.)
Internet Archive and Google provide such a HUGE benefit that to in effect make them illegal due to one single person out of 500,000,000 being a hardass-bastard is totally not acceptable.
Apparently this woman is an idiot, if she didn't want to be indexed she should have specified so in her robots.txt file (which she doesn't even have). This better be thrown out.
Suzanne Shell
14053 Eastonville Rd.
Elbert, CO 80106
719.749.2971
For those looking to share your views, Suzanne has asked that we continue to contact her organization at her official "non-web" addresses.
If you buy shrinkwrap software (i.e. Microsoft Windows) the EULA can't be read until you open it. I'm not sure if the validity of that practice has been tested in court. (If not, maybe it should be) Essentially, what this woman has done is the equivalent.
FYI: I visited the site and got an alert box with "cancel" or "OK" buttons, with OK indicating "I agree to this site's terms of use and purchase." Hitting "cancel" removes the "cancel" button, leaving the alert box freezing the browser unless you quit the browser or hit "OK." There was no link to her cockamamie "contract" nor was it visible on the home page.
With apologies to Abraham Lincoln: "God must love nutcases, he made so many of them."
A whois turned up an address. We might as well let her know how incompetent she is.
Does anyone know of a way to offset the costs for the Internet Archive? It's a shame to see a troll suck resources from such a noble project.
By reading this post or having it copied into your browser's cache, you agree to give me a permanent, irrevocable, fully paid-up license, at my option, to revoke, amend, terminate, or waive any breach of any contract of adhesion, EULA, click-through license, or any other such license or contract which does not bear my physical (i.e. the non-electronic kind made with a pen) signature or the physical signature of a designated agent you have entered with me, or to take that action on your behalf. In the event of any disagreement pertaining to, arising under, or relating to this license, you give me the choice of law and venue and agree not to oppose any changes of venue, motions for removal to or from federal court, or objections to standing that I request and that you give me the right to waive any objections on your behalf. In the event of any breech, you agree to pay all of my court costs and attorney's fees.
:] Honestly, I hope this'll get thrown out soon, the judge just might not be able to do that at this stage in the litigation. I mean, hell, how long as SCO vs. IBM been going on now?
If you do not agree to this, you must get my signature in pen and ink stating that whatever license or contract you propose is not subject to this agreement. After all, if you don't think this is valid, just why the HELL do you think some stupid thing you put on your web page is!?
-----
There, put that bugger on your website, and let them weasel out of that
you agree to accept all my modifications to it. If you attempt to enforce the unmodified version of the contract and ignore my modifications, you agree to pay me US$5000 plus any costs of defending myself from your claims and you agree that the jurisdiction for pursuing any claim regarding my modifications will be the jurisdiction where I maintain my personal residence and you must write 500 times "I need to be smarter about how I make money from the misfortune of others. I need to not be so bitter about life. I need to quit wasting time and effort on things of relative unimportance that distract me from what good work I _can_ do."
Because the library paid for the original copy, and doesn't republish it in duplicate at a later date, for two things.
I both agree and disagree. There is certainly a potentially useful service here, but also a potentially damaging one.
I wonder if, in a few years' time, we won't look back at the "liberal" information exchange of today's Internet and realise that we went too far. There is not automatically value in preserving everything that was ever published; people make mistakes, and a great many people have avoided suffering unreasonably from an innocent mistake or moment of madness in their youth because memories fade. Unless, of course, your personal details and intimate memories are preserved by archives of today's social networking sites, personal blogs, and so on.
I would rather we gave up on robots.txt as an obscure and backwards approach, and instead saw Internet standards bodies pushing for a widely-known opt-in convention that could make it clear to search engines, archives, caches and the like what content was intended to be available for these uses. I suspect many legitimate, informative sites would quickly adopt such a convention, and it would remove all risk from organisations like libraries and searching/caching services who are on shaky legal ground right now. At the same time, it wouldn't inadvertently preserve information that could be all too damaging later on, yet has little if any real value to society.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
how exactly does it help "freedom to acquire useful knowledge" to stop people from being able to acquire and use against her in court useful knowledge of what a scumbag she is?
Am I the only one who sees the error in her logic? How can a spider know about a "do not crawl me" notice without first crawling it?
DON'T LOOK AT ME
You didn't know not to look at that line without first reading it, did you?
Yes, I caught the pregnancy thing, too. Way to slant coverage.
As I've been doing research related to homeschool laws and homeschooling my daughter, I've become very distrustful of child services overall. In many areas, they ignore the law, tromp all over parental rights (such as illegal search and seizure, due process, etc.), and, unless you can afford litigation, the only way to work with the system is to confess and "cooperate". They seize children or harass parents based on ideological differences and ignore subjects of real abuse. I have also directly seen cases where prejudice leaves children in foster care when close relatives are willing and able to care for children (children mixed race, white relatives). I know a woman who has been in and out of drug rehab and prison for years now and had abusive boyfriends and the system keeps trying to give her kid back to her, but they find time to harass parents who want to give their kids a good education. There are good people in the system, but they are extremely overworked and it doesn't take many zealots to drag things down.
That being said, Shell is an extremist and a freak who does much more harm than good. There are other advocacy groups who are better organized, less militant, and more effective, such as the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.
Children need to be protected, but parents need to be free to pursue differences in religion, ideology, parental practices, and so forth without reprisal and child protection needs to take children away from abusive drunks and drug addicts, not to mention cut down on abuse in schools (by other children and adults).
Sure they can, they just cannot copy information from the indexed sites and show that to you. So when you do a search, you just get a list of URLs as a result.
- Raynet --> .
Furthermore, she has a link at the top of the page saying, "(I want to print this letter)." Scroll down to the bottom and you see the usual legal bullshit, "The content if this web site is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to archive, copy, print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein." Is she going to sue the kids for, "breach of contract", next?
If I was the judge, I'd dismiss the case as complete bullcrap and order her ovaries surgically removed to insure stupidity like her can never reproduce again,...
This product may cause major disfunctional, anxiety and major electron discombulation inside your brains; DO NOT EXPOSE YOURSELF FOR OVER 5 MINUTES! needless to say this product is disabled of any print and if you are having problems viewing this product it is because we did not get any clue in
BECAUSE READI NG
IS
NOT IMPORTANT
FOR YOU^H^H^HUS!
We don't even have a robots.txt online, so you cannot copy it ! HAH!!!
For any reference, please only look to this website if you are a family member in need of an eye physician soon and in heavy despair of reading through our reading protection then enjoy your stay at our site! (*) I cannot believe I posted this under my account--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
... was the ridiculous fee of $5K per page per copy of a hardcopy of anything posted on the web site.
Somehow during my 25+ years of immersion in computer technology, I've managed to miss the part where it became possible for her to detect whether I've printed anything from her web site. And can she tell what font size I'm printing at? Because if she can't, how does she know whether I would owe her 2 X $5K, 4 X $5K, or whatever?
I don't know what her story is and why it led her to her little crusade and, frankly, I don't need to or even want to know. She comes off as little more than another form of those kooks who'd sue neighborhood parents for allowing their children to play in front of her house, or making noise, or allowing a ball to fall on her lawn. IMHO, those posters who've labeled her "stupid bitch" need to include "psycho" in their decription. This is another of those things you run across on the Internet that make you wish it were mandatory that ISPs require some sort of psychological testing before they let you set up a web site. If we're lucky, she'll wear out her welcome in Colorado's court system and be barred from filing any more suits.
BTW, by reading this post you have agreed to enter into a contract whereby you agree to never seek any legal redress for portions of said post that you find objectionable. So there!
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Indexing the web as it currently stands (or at least, very recently stood) is nothing like the same as republishing entire web sites that are no longer publicly available. Nothing in my previous post implies that legitimate search engine activity would be barred, not least because the copies made for that purpose are likely to fall under fair use (or local near-equivalent) exemptions.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
We should have Slashdotted her site instead of rant about it.
I'm afraid I don't accept either your premise that these things should be opt-out, nor that archive.org really provides a "HUGE" net benefit. I commented on this elsewhere in this discussion.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Wait, so ISP caches are ok because they'll probably be deleted fairly soon whereas Archive.org isn't because they hold on to it longer?
Personally, I've never understood why there is so much hate for archive.org on Slashdot. It's not like they're claiming it's their own work. If anything they're saving you some bandwidth! Granted if your site makes money through ads you'll miss out on a few clicks, but since people only tend to go to Archive.org when your site is down anyway, you were going to miss out on those clicks regardless.
I guess you do lose some ability to quickly retract all trace of your page from the internet (although even that is an illusion, unless your site was obscure chances are people have quoted from it and talked about it somewhere, and you can't erase other people's posts nearly as easily).
I read the internet for the articles.
Sounds like a setup and she was fishing for something to sue over.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
(s).
As plain as that. Doesnt have a robots.txt, doesnt vaguely know what indexing is and what does it serve for the well being (and even usability) of the web, but sets up a fucking website.
where are 'black hats' when you need one ?
Read radical news here
To help her to proper mantain her website. You know, when you don't visit something in a long time it tends to get spiders and dust, if you know what I mean.
Do you know how many protocols are in use, just during basic web surfing or e-mail use? Why should these conventions (and that's all they are; some of them are explicitly optional requests, even according to their own definitions) trump the law of the land, just because we're on the Internet?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The woman should be sued for being a lowsy webmaster. If you don't want some sections to be spidered, you should place it in a robots.txt file.
your analogy sucks.
in the real world, the way I keep your 'robot' out is I build a fence or I keep my door closed.
that is the convention in the 'real world' to keep 'photo robots' out.
on the internet, proper useage is defined by conventions and standards that are well known.
if you want to play in it's sandbox, you play by it's rules
robots.txt is the rule.. if you can't supply it- you don't belong in the box.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Has there ever been a case of robots.txt being challenged in a court?
Results 1 - 100 of about 1,110,000 for "robots.txt" legal|illegal|court|courts|sue|sued|suing. (0.24 seconds)
You can go there to learn ALL all about how to get around allegations of abuse of your children.
Enjoy!
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
you can't get to the point of inserting a legal DVD into your machine without passing a copyright notice in print along the way...
thats where your analogy/defense falls apart.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
the copyright notice starts out:
it makes me wonder if misspellings and juvenile language ("CP$", "coconspirators", etc.) have any effect on the enforceability of a contract.
and, like several other posters pointed out, i was able to access this text by clicking cancel every time i was presented with a prompt, without entering a password, etc. it would be funny to see people with such a distorted view of intellectual property laws if there weren't also stories about stroke victims and children being sued by the riaa...
-esme
and it's using different size fonts in the same sheet of text, different fonts, different styles, different colors. The site, especially the copyright notice seems to violate every law of HTML abuse except . This leads me to believe she's either just totally schizoid person with no sense of style and no knowledge of the web, or she's just doing everything she can to piss people off and stir controversy.
However, I think she's bitten off more than she can chew with this lawsuit.. companies like Google cannot allow this to fly, so they won't buy her off because that would bring out 10000 copycats each with their hand out. As to her chances of actually winning, i think that's not even worth the ink that's been used on this site to discuss the possibility.
But hey, america's all about pursuit of happyness, and maybe controversy makes her happy. Her site seems to indicate that.
By this logic, it seems like all the spider would have to do is add its own counter-contract right in the HTTP request.
GET / HTTP/1.1 By responding to this request, you agree that SpiderCo's Spider does not speak English and, being written only two years ago, is not of legal age (18 in most jurisdictions) to enter a contract. By continuing to serve content in response to this request, you agree that any contracts contained in such content are null and void. Thank you and have a nice day.
<CR>
<CR>
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
>>Ignorance is not an excuse. Welcome to the Internet... learn the protocols.<<
This argument could also be applied to Archive.org. The fact that they didn't *know* about the license (because their crawler couldn't read it) doesn't mean that the contract doesn't apply to them.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
No. ISP caches are somewhat dubious anyway (for example, they damage web hosts by messing up server statistics) but more importantly here, they play a very different role to the original web server, while archive.org is in the same field.
I don't hate archive.org, but (a) I just don't like the principle of taking others' work without permission, either ethically or legally, and (b) I have never yet seen them present an accurate copy of any web site I've maintained, while they have had numerous incomplete or poorly rendered versions that give a bad impression of the sites I carefully maintain.
I've discussed the liabilities of permanent archive and argued that it isn't automatically a good thing elsewhere in this discussion.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Just out of curiosity, are there any laws which prevent prevent the advocation of illegal acts such as this? I know if you actively encourage somebody in a crime (say, cheering on a beating) or some other circumstances, you can be charged with "aiding and abetting."
How about if you're just posting material advocating illegal acts?
and tell her what a moron she is: dsshell@ix.netcom.com
I don't look at speed limit signs!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Archive.org re-publishes other sites' content. That's breaking copyright, period.
Copyright does not give the copyright holder complete control over who may copy or republish his content; some activities fall under fair use (at least in the US), and the Internet Archive has gotten fair use exemptions for much more contentious content than this woman's home page.
robots.txt is a nice convention, but its absence doesn't allow anyone to break copyright. Where does that idea come from??
"Conventions" are what a lot of the law is about. If the convention is that permission to spider/not spider is indicated by a robots.txt file, then the woman has to comply with that. It's a reasonable convention, it's easy to do, and there are no alternative conventions in common use.
Key point you missed:
The license agreement she has is of dubious validity, therefore it has no bearing. As others have said, if you try to read the terms, you get taken to a page which asks you if you agree. If you click yes, you get taken to see what you just agreed to, if you click no, you get taken to a page which tells you that you have agreed by being on the site.
IANAL, but I'm not sure she is able to enforce that on a human, much less on a robot, especially without putting any of the conventional warnings to robots up.
Actually, could somebody take the step of writing robots.txt and such into proper rules, not just reccomendations, so this would have absolutely no excuses?
"Lisp
Knowing how the internet works and claiming Archive.org and Google are massive copyright violators are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Pot is plentiful and easy to obtain, but that doesn't mean it isn't illegal (in the US).
While I understand the importance of web searches, would it be so hard to change the nature of web crawlers so that they didn't spider a site unless they were specifically allowed? You know, like you don't generally walk into somebody's house or cube at work and start rummaging through their stuff just because the door is open. Unless a web-crawler is invited into a site (via robots.txt) then it doesn't index it. It doesn't deal with browser cache, but people generally seem to be worried about centralized collection of their sites, not whether a few hundred scattered people grabbed the pages.
It seems like a simple solution, but I can't decide whether it would improve or harm the overall content of search engines. On one hand you wouldn't get a bunch of personal home pages when searching for some topics, but on the other hand you might lose information simply because a different person "doesn't understand how the internet works".
Isn't there web standards and pratices that are done as a part of how the web operates? There is a way to post no robots or spiders in the HTML code that will stop everything from indexing their site.
This is like going to the tlelphone company, ordering some phone service, telling you friend you don't want a published number then suing the phone company for publishing the number.
There is a process and proceedure in place. I don't see how it could be anyones elses problem if you ignore that process or proceedure. There are standards and set policies about the web that anyone wanting to know can find out with reletive ease. I just did a quick google search for "stopping search engines from listing my site" and a ton of relevent answers poped up. A notable answer was this one from the W3.org describing the robots.txt standard and what you can do in adittion to it dating from 1996. It has around for that long.
It isn't anyones fault but hers if someone indexed her site because she didn't follow the proper proceedure to do so. Posting a warning in writing that she knows a spider/robot will read or understand is this girls way of invinting a lawsuit. She ignored proceedure and process with the implicit intent to trick someone into a lawsuit. And she used the shrinkwrap style license to do so. If anything was ever frivilous, this is.
I hope the fact that standard and rules that were in place before she decided to join the club were ignored helps invalidate sneakily placed information in shrink wrap licenses. I also hope it goes to show this as being a frivilous lawsuite and she gets punished as a result.
Oops.
Does it validate w3? The answer is no ;)
Seriously however, robots.txt could have solved this issue. Oddly enough the site says I am not able to save/copy/print on their "help" page. I tried all the above on the main page and it worked. Shoddy protection to say the least.
I'm not contending that her silly contractual statement has any legal weight; in fact, I'd be stunned if it did. I'm just arguing that this doesn't prevent archive.org from being liable for copyright infringement if they copied her web site without permission.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
On her site (oh, wait, it's copyright protected, I can't talk about it...)
Anyway, just reported Google, Yahoo, & MS Live Search's caches to her. I hope I get some reward when she wins millions in her copyright infringement suit against them!
</sarcasm>
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It could be argued that if you place a computer on the Internet, you're subject to whatever traffic you may get - that there is no excuse for lack of education, etc.
On the other hand, in the real world, not everyone is on par with tech-savvy users.
If I explicitly place a robots.txt file that disallows crawling (and I do), I expect the spider to honor it. In fact, there are a few that do not -- I record this activity and they're promptly placed in a blackhole firewall filter. Permanently.
It stands to question, however, why Google and other sites would waste time spidering dynamic networks. IPs, sites, are subject to change IPs at any given moment - and I would think that's of little utility to the engines' database.
Ever run across a link that is no longer there?
I think this is going to be a new day (or the start of) for spidering and such, and I feel it's fair enough that these engines seek out some form of permission. Obviously, it's unrealistic for them to contact every end-user on a dynamic network - but the ISP could have an "agreement" and monitor that traffic. How would that be managed?
Personally, Google... stop spidering dynamic networks. It's a no-brainer to determine which IPs are dynamic, and you certainly have the resources to refine your searches.
At the same time, I appreciate that these random findings are what have made Google and Yahoo.. indeed, the Internet search business as a whole.
Where is the fair middle ground?
As for the spidering companies (and ignorant individuals) that do no every consult rules in robots.txt, you will get what you deserve.
You need to read the legal judgements rather than TFA as MSM rarely gets this stuff right.
. pdf
This is unlikely to have a direct impact on spidering at large as archive.org reproduces websites en masse, which is a big part of the judgement. Very few spidering systems do this and it is likely that is reasonable that they do not have a legal right to.
Also, does robots.txt have a method for declaring what you're allowed to do with the contents you spider?
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/waybackshell
"Shell contends that Internet Archive formed a contract with her when it reproduced her website contents, and then breached this contract when it failed to pay her the prescribed fees. Internet Archive argues that it never entered into a contract with Shell. It is undisputed that the parties did not form an explicit contract. Rather, Shell states that Internet Archive entered a contract with her by its conduct in reproducing her web materials."
http://www.profane-justice.org/assets/images/autog en/a_2galbut.gif
Technically you can't actually click to see the terms without agreeing to them.
No contract there according to my understanding of contract law here in the UK
If you own the copyright then you can decide how your content is used and you can come up with distribution and re-use terms of your own. I would think that the proper way to deal with it would be to send Google, archive.org and whomever else a formal warning but that doesn't change the matter.
I think all this bullshit about "proper" posting of terms and such is a red herring and not really applicable, if the material is copyrighted then it's really the responsibility of the person that copies it to verify that they have permission to do so.
I bet they try to settle.
google has her site cached (actually an older version) http://72.14.209.104/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3 A%2F%2Fwww.profane-justice.org%2F&btnG=Search
No robots.txt ... how should a crawler read this information?
Even *with* a robots.txt, how should a crawler read the information? Robots.txt files are advisory, not legally mandated, and should remain such. How can they inform a non-sentient computer program of the terms and conditions attached to its accessing a web site in such a way that allows it to make an informed decision about whether or not to access that site? Because that would be necessary, legally speaking, for a contract to be formed.
That is correct.
But if she specifically wanted her content not to be archived, she could have prevented that with robots.txt files and/or meta tags. Of course you are completely right about more complex terms and conditions.
Hmmm, interesting. Are there any browsers out there that could operate with RAM only, and not save files to disc? I have interest in such a product for privacy's (and others) sake.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
OK, since we've got here already, let me preempt the next 500 factually incorrect "moral high ground" type posts.
And let me correct your misconceptions.
Fallacy: By putting your content on the web, you're giving permission for archive sites to duplicate it.
Reality: By putting your content on the web, you're giving permission for visitors to read it. Under the law in many jurisdictions, they are also allowed to make personal copies of the work under "fair use" style legislation. However, nothing about this gives any permission to republish it in any jurisdiction I know of, and indeed it's hard to see how it could do for any nation that is a signatory to the major WIPO treaties. Even if this were the case, such permission would be implicit, and there was an explicit notice on the web site in this case making her wishes clear.
The only jurisdiction that matters is the one Internet Archive is based in. I procede under the assumption that this is a US jurisdiction. The US fair use exemption does allow for republication, specifically. Here, for example, is a case where fair use was deemed to allow republication. No notice, however explicit, can take away fair use rights: in the case I just cited, the owner of the copyright did in fact explicitly deny permission for the publisher to republish their work, but the publisher did so anyway and it was held to still be fair use.
Fallacy: This isn't fair: software can't read arbitrary contracts!
Reality: This is not her problem. If someone wants to use software to copy stuff that isn't theirs, it is their responsibility to make sure that doing so is legal.
Yes, it is. That doesn't mean that they have automatically accepted the terms of her contract: in common law jurisdictions (including the US), to form a contract one must intend to do so. A computer program cannot have such intent, although its programmers may have had intent when they wrote it, and its operators may have had intent when they instructed it to perform a certain task. As Internet Archive clearly did not know about the contract in this case, it is unclear how they could have intended to enter into it.
It also means that regardless of the legality of copying the material, she has no right to demand the $5,000 per page fee that is specified in her contract (although this published tariff may be taken into account in setting the amount of any damages she is awarded for copyright infringement). Nor does she have any right to demand the $50,000 late payment fee specified in her contract (although she may be entitled to statutory interest, depending on the jurisdiction in which the case is heard).
(Note: the above is not legal advice, check any information with a lawyer before placing reliance on it, it is provided for informational purposes only, etc.)
Go read up on caching in HTTP and learn how to work with web caches instead of against them. Do it properly and you save bandwidth and server load while getting the non-cacheable requests you need/want.
I checked out the website in question. Which is located here: http://www.profane-justice.org/ the rules for that website just seem too harsh for a website that is trying to be a Family Advocacy Center. I don't know too many family's, or children that have five grand laying around before they even print out a few pages on that website. Doesn't look like it to me that they really want to help the public, if they are demanding so much money like they are. For such a website it just seems to me the rules need to be more flexible. Their Foster child page is geared towards a child. But what if they needed a print out of that page to give to their lawyer? I realize they waiver the fee for family's. But the way they have the page setup, and the mere sound of the words is a turn off for most seeking good help online. A child will not read through the full copyright page to see they are excluded from paying the fee. They will just see the parts on the pages on the bottom that say pay us $5,000.00 or else be sued.
I don't like the layout either. Looks like crap. In the copyright notice it states that the website is only to be viewed on a computer. I wonder if she has heard of the term of Fair Use? Plus the website itself is on a .org domain. This is usually reserved for nonprofits. You want a real eye opener read the part about the credit card charge back in the copyright notice at the bottom.
I don't think the woman has a case either. There are ways to protect pages, and one of them is the robots text. But what person in their right mind would put a full block on a website that advocates Family Advocacy?
Nothing in my previous post implies that legitimate search engine activity would be barred, not least because the copies made for that purpose are likely to fall under fair use (or local near-equivalent) exemptions.
You stated in your previous post that fair use does not allow republication. While you were incorrect in this point (which I have pointed out in a separate post), if it were true, it would prevent google from operating as they currently do, as they excerpt the title and a small amount of text from each page they produce in a search result and republish it on their own site.
What ridiculous bullshit is this? What's next? I will carry a post-it note in my pocket that says you can't give me dirty looks. Then when you do I'll just sue you because I have this little post-it note saying you can't? Are you f-ing kidding me? If she is too stupid to read up on how to prevent her site from being crawled then it is her own fault, end of story.
But if she specifically wanted her content not to be archived, she could have prevented that with robots.txt files and/or meta tags.
True, but that isn't what she wanted. She wanted to be paid $5,000 per page copied.
I wonder if the inevitable judgment against this woman could provide useful precedent against some of the more annoying automatic EULA's?
I, for one, would not click on this link if I wanted to keep my butt out of court..
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
seriously. do it for the clever banter, or just do it for my monitor, which is still dripping with the drink i spat all over it while reading that post.
because now I just have to sit back and wait Google to collapse then I will set up my own search company in a country where frivolous lawsuits like this do not exist AND CONQUER THE WORLD
I read it, it's crazy and the whole case should be dropped (optionally she should be poked in the eye with a red-hot poker).
She claims that her intent is to make a profit from her website, so....
Is she really annoyed about archive.org archiving her website, or was she attempting to set a profitable trap by posting a copyright notice which she knew the spiders wouldn't acknowledge, which would allow her to sue archive.org?
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Rich at last! Muwahahahahahaha.
Agreed on both counts.
Of course it does. That is, after all, the point. But the nature of the reproduction is limited by the four criteria specified in the legislation. In general, it does not cover 100% reproduction of an original work in the same form and for the same purpose, which is what we're talking about here. I don't dispute either your example here or the Google example in your other post, but they are not the same as what we're talking about here.
No it doesn't, and nothing I've posted anywhere in this thread says I believe her contractual shenanigans are appropriate. I am simply contending that this does not affect any earlier infringement that archive.org may have committed.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Solid point.
Archive.org might manage to get away with it as they're providing a public service or something, but probably it's mostly the fact that people don't mind that keeps them alive.
This could prove interesting, if only for a bit of clarification on that.
"Lisp
Actually, unless I am googling the wrong person, it appears Suzanne Shell and her site are connected with Scientology. This would be a big surprise, as they never launch nuisance suits or otherwise harrass archive.org!
Can someone please republish this site on a mirror?
... and then they built the supercollider.
part of ongoing battle between archive.org and church of scientology. the legalese is there to help in court, the lack of robots.txt to get the paged archived so scientology can sue again. Suzanne Shell has been affiliated with the church of scientology for quite a while, a google on scientology and suzanne shell gives you everything you need to know.
if she can't put together a website properly then it's her problem. if the website had a robots file then it would be skipped. the courtroom should no longer be a place for an idiot offense or defense. the internet is public, and not designed to serve exclusive rights. everything that does preserve exclusivity is a band-aid, but the steps must be taken before legal action of any kind.
Great..
So now she has shown everyone on the internet she's a complete fucking idiot.
Surely she thought they were copying her website, but what an ignorant!!
ghostbar page.
It's OK now - after negotiating with Ms. Shell she agreed to place the contents of her site into the public domain. Here's a copy of our contract:
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: By accepting this HTTP GET request you agree to release into the public domain the entire contents of this web site.
Host: www.profane-justice.org
Pragma: no-cache
Accept: */*
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2007 02:11:09 GMT
Server: Apache
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
Hey, looks like her site got Slashdotted. Time for her to sue CmdrTaco?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
What are the statistics on kids who never get medical attention for injuries because of mandatory reporting?
There are certain things that people should be able to do without fear, and seeking medical attention should be one of them.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
This woman's gonna sue Google too!
Tag lost or not installed.
That's the most absurd thing I've read in quite a while. Let me replace a few words for you...
Consider electrical outlets. These may potentially have high voltages present. A user unaware of the behavior of electrical outlets may run around sticking forks in them. Hell, they may even do it while standing in a puddle. etc. etc..
Now repeat after me.. AS AN ADULT, I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR MY OWN ACTIONS. If you don't know what it is or how it works, I firmly believe that it is solely YOUR (not societies) responsibility to make damn sure that it won't hurt you.
Woman with an abusive boyfriend/spouse/shackup/whatever.
Boyfriend beats her up. She doesn't feel too good. Got a bad headache now and her vision is blurry. She wants to go to the ER, but she knows if she does, her boyfriend will go to jail again. Does she go seek medical attention? Should she have to weigh her health against her boyfriend being taken away? Against what he'll do to her when he's out on bond?
Now maybe you or I think boyfriend belongs in jail, but that's beside the point. The point is she probably doesn't. After all, she's still with him. She still goes back to him again and again.
The reasons women come back to abusive boyfriends are also beside the point. The fact is they do. And they don't want their abusive boyfriends in jail. And the pete's sake, their health shouldn't be sacrificed because of it. They should be able to seek medical attention without fear of repercussions.
That is why I am against mandatory reporting. Health and medical treatment should be a private matter between doctor and patient. If the victim wanted the police involved, she would have called 911 already.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Does anyone have a Coral cache link for it?
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Let's not forget its her server which served the page content to the robot. The robot did not trespass, but rather just sent a request for a page, her server delivered.
OMG! Ignorance is not an excuse. If you want your content to NOT be crawled, then do the right thing and setup a robots.txt file. Simple as that. If she can't take the time to search for that and take the necessary steps.
I can't believe the courts are allowing any part of her case to move forward. There IS a mechanism in place to tell people to bugger off, robots.txt.
OMG.
Winged Power Photography
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I guess my question is, "Did she take advantage of the most simple method for specifying her preference regarding the behavior of web crawling robots?". If she had a properly formated file indicating her preference, then she has a legitimate question to ask. If not, she is stirring up a tornado in a teacup on only bringing laughter upon herself for not knowing robots rules of order (a joke).
In general, it does not cover 100% reproduction of an original work in the same form and for the same purpose, which is what we're talking about here.
I disagree that the purpose is the same. The use is transformative in that it turns live web pages into historical records that can be searched by date and time to show how sites have evolved over the course of their history. The use is also non-commercial and is unlikely to significantly impact the commercial viability of operating a web site for profit. Because of these three factors, I believe the use of 100% of the material is appropriate.
Of course, that kind of decision is for the trial judge to make, not me, but I'm pretty confident he'll come down on the side of IA's use being fair use.
So - you psychos who are calling me non-stop and REFUSING to give their names (cowards) - my sheriff's office is trapping your calls and I'm pressing charges.
she forgot to sue google. the site is slashdotted and i read it via google cache (which seems to do the same as archive.org). Had she put up a robots.txt (requesting the /robots.txt from her site gives a 404) hadn't she been indexed. She should read up how to prevent such things instead of putting a notice on the site which can only be agreed upon the page is already requested (ie. i wouldn't have downloaded the page if i had known before).
part of ongoing battle between archive.org and church of scientology. the legalese is there to help in court, the lack of robots.txt to get the paged archived so scientology can sue again. Suzanne Shell has been affiliated with the church of scientology for quite a while, a google on scientology and suzanne shell gives you everything you need to know.
I googled it, and the results don't support the claim. "Suzanne Shell" returns over 18,000 hits; "Suzanne Shell" scientology returns only 13, and a sample of them shows no clear evidence of a relationship (the most is a scientologist source mentioning her).
Very interesting.
Weird, the site is http://www.profanejustice.com/, which has a blank robots.txt, and is just a frame for http://the-united-states-of-america.net/projustice . And I cannot find the copyright notice or contract anywhere.
/robots.txt
Sometime soon, people will start to notice that the old laws controlling flow of information no longer works. Not only are the laws useless, but they can't even be followed. And if they are followed, the end result is worse for everyone.
At least I hope people will start to notice.
And she implies that "we" are deliberately harassing her:
.oddly, without contacting me for my side of the story. Really piss poor journalism if you ask me.
.because I'm just one lone citizen activist who does not have the resources to handle this kind of traffic, which, by the way, is INTENDED to shut this site down.
NOTICE - this site is being massively "Hit" by misguided people who think I'm terrible for suing Internet Archive. For the record:
* Internet Archive sued ME first!
* Internet Archive sued me to get a court to say that its making 87 unauthorized versions of this entireweb site and displaying it was ok, (that their copying without seeking permission, without paying fees, without consideration for the harmful uses to which the child savers would put this site against falsely accused parents and in total defiance of my lawful licensing of uses of this intellectual property).
* Yes, I sued back, and so far, won the most important part of Internet Archive's motion to dismiss.
These same people are harassing me by calling my home phone with NON -stop harassment, threats, obscenities and abuses.
I have learned, but not yet verified that digg.com and informationweek.com have reportedly written articles about this lawsuit. .
So - you psychos who are calling me non-stop and REFUSING to give their names (cowards) - my sheriff's office is trapping your calls and I'm pressing charges. I am also reporting each of your abusive and harassing emails. I enjoy a good respectful debate as much as the next guy, but I'm not anybody's whipping boy.
The rest of this site is down for a few days. .
Ummm...she did this deliberately to entrap Google and you want her to "learn a lesson"...?
No sig today...
Everyone is naive in some field. Are you an accountant, a lawyer, an electrical engineer, a road safety researcher, a trained negotiator, a computer expert, and a pilot? Probably not, but chances are that you rely on the expertise of people who are everyday. Luckily we have developed a society where people with different specialisms can interact, and share the benefits of what each can do.
In such a society, there will always be scope for a specialist to take advantage of a non-specialist. Thus we have developed things like consumer protection laws and business regulations. These laws aren't there to protect the stupid, they are there because no-one can know everything about everything.
So yes, I agree entirely that people should take a reasonable level of personal responsibility for their actions, and certainly far more than some nanny states have expected recently. I just prefer to keep this in perspective, and recognise that no-one is a universal expert, and therefore laws should be framed to support non-experts too.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
* Internet Archive sued ME first!
* Internet Archive sued me to get a court to say that its making 87 unauthorized versions of this entireweb site and displaying it was ok, (that their copying without seeking permission, without paying fees, without consideration for the harmful uses to which the child savers would put this site against falsely accused parents and in total defiance of my lawful licensing of uses of this intellectual property).
* Yes, I sued back, and so far, won the most important part of Internet Archive's motion to dismiss.
These same people are harassing me by calling my home phone with NON -stop harassment, threats, obscenities and abuses.
I have learned, but not yet verified that digg.com and informationweek.com have reportedly written articles about this lawsuit. . .oddly, without contacting me for my side of the story. Really piss poor journalism if you ask me.
So - you psychos who are calling me non-stop and REFUSING to give their names (cowards) - my sheriff's office is trapping your calls and I'm pressing charges. I am also reporting each of your abusive and harassing emails. I enjoy a good respectful debate as much as the next guy, but I'm not anybody's whipping boy.
The rest of this site is down for a few days. . .because I'm just one lone citizen activist who does not have the resources to handle this kind of traffic, which, by the way, is INTENDED to shut this site down. "
Well, that didn't post so well :-) The source from her website posts crap to PayPal.com (which is what I tried to paste). Oh well
You make an interesting comment about the use being transformative; I've never seen it framed that way before. I'm not sure I personally buy it -- I'm not entirely convinced that the use there is different enough from the normal use of the data to be a genuinely new thing -- but it's certainly a fair argument to make.
I'd agree with the non-commercial factor. (A more interesting case there would be someone like Google, who makes money through the advertising on its various services, but offers them for no direct cost to the public. I would take this to be commercial, but perhaps a good lawyer could argue otherwise.)
I'm not sure about significant market impact. I can think of plenty of cases where sites deliberately put up material temporarily, but charge for access to their archives as a way of funding the new content, for example. Permitting archive.org to reproduce such material would undermine the existing business model. That would have a direct impact on the value of the company's existing archives. It could also be against the public interest, since it might drive the company to switch to (for example) a subscription model where no content was freely available without a paid-for account, thus reducing the amount of information freely available on the web.
It would certainly be an interesting court case if archive.org was ever challenged in isolation (without the attendant contractual shenanigans we seem to have in this case). Even then, though, it would be tough to read any precedents into the result either way. One of the nice things about US fair use law is that it pretty much requires each case to be considered on its own merits, but that does have a downside as far as clarifying the law for others goes.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
if google has right to browse your site you have also right to browse google
for example, you can automatically request list of results, process it to create metasearch services
Along these lines, it would seem that HER server made the copy, and then transmitted that copy -- willingly -- to the search engine. It's also worthwhile to note that her server most likely knew it was a search engine based on the UserAgent string it sent with the request. Should her server have followed the URL and read the agreement, it would understand the consequences of creating and providing that copy to the search engine.
US Court of Appeasls for the Tenth District (html doc online)
v.
and
I. Background
Ms. Fields's daughter was the subject of a dependency and neglect proceeding initiated by the state of Colorado in January 2003. In connection therewith, the state provided Ms. Fields a court-appointed attorney, Mr. Kender, but Ms. Fields also hired Ms. Shell, a journalist who researches and documents child protection agencies' practices, to act as an expert consultant. Shortly thereafter, Ms. Fields executed a power of attorney naming Ms. Shell as her agent. Ms. Fields also agreed to be included in Ms. Shell's documentary video project concerning child protection services.
On April 16, 2003, Mr. Meconi, the Fremont County DHS's attorney, filed a motion in state court to make Ms. Shell a special respondent in the pending dependency and neglect action. The motion sought to prevent Ms. Shell "from contacting the minor child or [Ms. Fields] . . . and from otherwise being involved in the proceedings . . . , including, but not limited to, acting as counsel for [Ms. Fields] or otherwise engaging in the unauthorized practice of law."
[. . .]
On May 9, after a hearing on the motion to make Ms. Shell a special respondent, the state court issued an order granting the motion, vesting legal custody of Ms. Fields's daughter with the Fremont County DHS, and scheduling a jury trial. In making Ms. Shell a special respondent the court observed that Ms. Shell, "in the guise of acting as the agent" for Ms. Fields, has "essentially been providing legal advice to [Ms. Fields]." The state court further ordered Ms. Shell specifically prohibited from:
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
An intact hymen is sometimes found in sexually active women.
And lack of signs of trauma is no evidence that a sexual assault has occurred. Only about half of rape victims have visible evidence of trauma. Arguing that a lack of bruising (in an exam that may have occurred weeks after the incident) shows that he was innocent is up there with the argument that if a woman begs her rapist to use a condom that it obviously couldn't have been rape.
And its odd that if she was mommie dearest there was no evidence that he could muster against her? Plus that must be a damn smart three-year-old to be able to maintain that facade after evaluation by a trained forensic psychologist. In my experience kids aren't even good at maintaining a lie about how the bead got in their nose, much less whether daddy put his penis where.
He may say that, and you may want to believe your friend, but like I said before: every prison is filled with innocent men.
-Nick
Yes, but the EULA on all software says "If you do not agree to the End User License Agreement, you may return this product to the place of purchase for a full refund" providing you the option after purchasing the product to invalidate your implicit agreement at no loss to yourself, other than needing to get another product.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Looks like it was a huge part of the American medical establishment.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I just don't know why people think they can pick up a keyboard and be considered master programmers...
This is one of the most ridiculous stories I have ever heard of.
Wants to protect her IP? All she has done is stripped down butt naked and placed herself on the sidewalk with a little sign saying "don't touch this" on her forehead.
Looking at this so called "protected site" there is no protection whatsoever!
Let's see, why don't we right click and copy some text.....hmmm that doesn't work. Ok, why not a select all and copy....BINGO! Now I have a copy of this first page! Let's paste this into Word!
But wait a minute the source code might be better cause we can easily just replicate the site down to the last p tag...Let's see, "view" menu, "View Source" and voila! oh wait a minute it looks blank and whats this? A notice saying source is not available? Foiled agai....oh I see! The scroll bar is telling me there is more on the page!
WooHoo! (in a Homer Simpson voice - yes even Homer Simpson canwork this one out)
Talk about absolute idiocy!
Ms Shell if your reading this, get off your arse and get a proper web designer to do your site and stop being cheap and pathetic.
It's been long known if you post content on the web it's there for the world to take what they want unless you protect it.
IF you want to show off your wares you place it in a glass cabinet with security cameras and alarms and any kind of protection you can use to prevent people from ripping off your content. If you want to advertise you create a summary that leads people to your product and describes what you are selling.
You do not put a diamond ring in the middle of the road and expect people to stand back and stare at it cause sooner than later someone is going to pick it up!
GET A FUCKING PROGRAMMER YOU IDIOT!
By reading or crawling this post, you hereby agree to ensure this woman gets what she deserves (and it certainly isn't the money). If, having crawled this post, you are not involved in her downfall, you shall donate $100,000,000 to the charity of your choice.
Am I the only one who believes that an entity which exists exclusively to be, and further by, producing copies of other people's work to provide as service does absolutely nothing more than underminine copyright law?
Oh, yeah; this is SlashDot. Nevermind...
"I agree to this site's terms of use and purchace as published in the copyright notice on each page"
Hitting cancel simply says
"If you disagree with the terms, you must indicate your disagreement by leaving this site or closing your browser now". with only an ok checkbox.
"" http://www.profane-justice.org/
It's not like there is trully any difference if you hit OK or cancel. No redirect to disney if you hit cancel. Nor has she taken the time to construct a robots.txt file.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
First Stop for Newcomers - Frequently Asked Questions and TERMS of use.
.you shouldn't believe everything you read on a blog site. . .sheesh. Grow a brain and engage it BEFORE you engage your mouth. **Note (politically correct disclaimer): If you don't have a sense of humor, we recommend not reading this FAQ.
.Hey, these *Internet Geeks have made li'l ole me a STAR! I'm blushing. . . see article and blog and blog
.if you can't stand the constituent heat, get out of the People's kitchen!
.How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every Security Operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?
FAQ about Internet Archive ** - so many of you IGeeks* got your digital panties in a twist, based on inaccurate reports. Goes to show you. .
Suzanne sez. .
Arizona's ANTI - FAMILY Congressman Hershberger retaliates against constituent - story. Dear Congressman Hershberger. .
Family Rights - issues and information, education a
Hawaii family advocate settles lawsuit against state agency for violations of civil rights. State loses motion to dismiss. NEW!
nd training, and family advocacy
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ARE YOU A FOSTER CHILD? This page is for you.
If you've witnessed injustice and have done nothing; if you've benefited when others have fought against injustice on your behalf and have abandoned your champions to stand alone once you were safely out of the clutches of tyranny: if you have the means or the skill to aid in the fight against injustice but hoard it to yourself, you should be ashamed, for you alone deserve the very bondage of tyranny that, by your silence and inaction, you have inflicted on your fellow man.
In view of the increasing attacks against caseworkers and other child savers, it behooves us take peaceful steps to prevent further escalation of defensive violence which history records is inevitable when the limits of human endurance for government abuse and injustice are exceeded - by eliminating the abuse and injustice, not by punishing the response to it.
. .
Or, if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat in their lairs paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly sat up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
Aleksandr Isaevich Solzshenitsyn
HOW RELIABLE IS ONLINE ADVICE?
Giving all the wrong answers to the right questions for some of the right reason? Article showing why seeking legal advice from online groups can hurt your case.
See our FAQ on what to look for when joining an online group. Despite grand promises to the contrary, nobody has the silver bullet you are looking for. Be safe or be sorry.
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Therefore, anyone publishing their content via the web (permitting it to be served via the HTTP protocol) has already bought into the idea that end users, as well as their "agents" (intermediaries such as proxies, caches, mirrors, and other technologies that necessarily, possibly as well as intentionally, "shift time"), can pick and choose what they do and do not want to view.
In short, Shell herself entered into a contract by publishing via the web — a contract in which she agreed to permit just the sorts of things that go on in HTTP-land, as the protocol envisioned. (This is even without the robots.txt standard, which applies to only polite guests of a website.)
Similarly, nobody ("A") should complain that sending an email (via the SMTP protocol) to Z resulted in some kind of privacy violations by B, C, D, ..., and Y, because they exchanged that email with each other, when it's inherent in the protocol that such exchanges will likely occur as the email propagates from A to Z. (Or, more obviously nuttily, though still akin to what Shell is claiming, that their copyright has been infringed because they emailed text including some anti-copying disclaimer to an email address they knew was "manned" by an automaton that published whatever was sent to it, such as a list manager or archive. If you want your English prose to be legally enforced, don't make it available to an entity that cannot read English but that you know will act contrary to it! Yet Shell did that when she gave her content to an HTTP server for publishing, and let that server provide it to HTTP clients, not all of which were necessarily humans that could read English.)
There are two ways to be sure that advertising published with your content remains connected to it as it (legally) propagates in HTTP-land:
My guess: archive.org did not seek to dismiss the copyright-infringement case because it's happier potentially setting a precedent against a poorly-represented individual who didn't engage in trivial "self-help" to avoid her plight and who might, for personal financial reasons, decide to make serious efforts to resolve the matter before it proceeds to trial (and costs her significant legal expenses as well as public humiliation).
Sometimes, when you believe you have a winning hand and especially when you know you are in the Right, had the best of intentions, and didn't go looking for a fight in the first place, as well as that you reasonably crossed all your t's and dotted your i's in the first place, you have to stand up and fight; at the very least, it shows you will likely do so, which might give future senders of cartoonies pause before filing their complaints.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
After a bit of research I have come the conclusion Ms Shell's agenda is three fold. Suing people she thinks she can collect from. Taking money from poor unsophisticated,vulnerable,and desperate people who are grasping at straws trying to put their broken families back together with her very risky and in my opinion very poor advice. And trashing anyone who doesn't agree with her and will do advocacy work on a volunteer basis rather than asking for money.
y IMPROVEMENTProject/?tab=s
Check out this website she says she doesn't own but sources directly to her and the comments go to her personal e-mail. http://badadvocates.com/ And then she I can't figure out why Yahoo lets her get away with the blatant abuse of their TOS with this one.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FamilyRightsAdvocac
Go to the early posts on that group and check out some of the crap she and her circle of friends are doing to people on that yahoo group.