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."

Comments

GRRRRRRRRRR

[ico2]

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

Re:Posted notice?

[Score Whore]

Since we know precisely who "they" is in the original statement your attempt to generalize your way out of looking like an idiot fails. If you wanted to support you claim that archive.org is not engaging in copyright violations, you would have to identify why they in particular are not. Pointing out that under specific conditions republishing is not copyright violation is not enough.

Secondly, you don't have a right to not be disagreed with, regardless of the validity of the argument used in explaining the disagreement. If I were a malicious sort your threats of legal action could get you in trouble.

Thirdly, surprisingly enough, you hit on my exact point without understanding it at all. Municipalities and states have used the processes and methods required by statute to specify the nature of the notices for no trespassing signs. I, as a trespasser, cannot require that you provide me with notice written in very small print on the back of a hundred dollar bill. Robots.txt is not law. It's not even an RFC. It's just an expired draft document, portions of which are used by various companies. Archive.org saying "you didn't have a robots.txt so we're going to republish your content" is like me telling a cop "the road isn't painted green, so I'm going to drive 140 MPH."

Finally, you know what's really ironic? The first paragraph of Archive.org's Terms of Use is this:

This terms of use agreement (the "Agreement") governs your use of the collection of Web pages and other digital content (the "Collections") available through the Internet Archive (the "Archive"). When accessing an archived page, you will be presented with the terms of use agreement. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use the Archive's Collections or its Web site (the "Site").

Wait! They're putting up an agreement page. But... but... what about robots.txt? If I was this lady, I'd just print that out and take it to court. Seems like a very clear statement that archive.org believes that such agreements are binding.

Re:Posted notice?

[Achromatic1978]

Failure to provide a simple robots.txt file evidences a lack of reasonable precaution and undermines plaintiff's claims to redress in a court of law.

Crap. Unless you have a complete dick for legal representation.

"Your Honor, we submit that because the plaintiff chose not to provide a file based on an ten year old, expired draft document that was once considered, and never annointed as an accepted standard, they clearly aren't interested in protecting their intellectual property, and ask for a motion of summary judgment."

Hahahaha! No.