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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."
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.
No, she didn't post the notice properly:
The case should be thrown out, period. She should just have learned her lesson and used a proper robots.txt file next time. If you're going to post stuff on the Internet and don't want it to beb indexed or archived, you should know what you're doing. If you don't, it's your problem. The lawsuit is frivolous and inane.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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?
The inaccurate Slashdot description would make you believe that, but actually she has this on her webpage: "IF YOU COPY OR DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING ON THIS WEB SITE, YOU ARE ENTERING INTO A CONTRACT".
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!
She filed pro se.
s e456.cfm
http://www.phillipsnizer.com/library/cases/lib_ca
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.
It isn't just a "nice convention". It's a sufficiently reasonable precaution available to plaintiff to effectively avoid the inadvertent disclosure of copyrighted documents. 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.
In her defense it seems she probably needs the money after being fined $6000 in a Colorado state court a few months ago for a contempt violation (unauthorized practice of law) after she participated in three separate Colorado court cases under a power of attorney when she had no prior involvement- after having been warned on a prior occasion that this was illegal in the state of Colorado. In fact it's illegal everywhere except Slashdot. But of course it's lies, all lies!She needs a good spanking.
No, but I'm pretty sure the contract isn't valid if you decline. Her statement that "by doing x you are entering a contract" shouldn't hold up in any reasonable court. Even with shrinkwrap licenses on software you have to click a button or hit a checkbox that says "I agree to the contract shown here", and those are on shaky ground as it is. While all the normal copyright laws still apply to her content, the only way to enter into a contract is still to explicitly agree to the contract.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
ROTFL. I didn't even see that part. Since it was buried below text talking about copying/printing, the assumption is that it is a continuation of that content, but it really isn't. More on why this text is also an illegal contract a little later.
But first, the obvious flaws: the content formatting is so unreadable that it's easy to miss. And then, there are the spelling and grammatical errors in their "license" notice.
For example, "The content if this website is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to archive, copy, print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein." Let's see. Run-on sentence, missing serial comma, misspelled a two-letter word.... Could someone explain to me why someone incapable of writing a very simple English sentence without tons of very basic 2nd grader mistakes is trying to make money on the internet?
And then, there's the fact that this woman lacks a basic fundamental understanding of computers. "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." Where to begin.... Magnetic, digital, and electronic reproduction do not involve printing! Oh, yeah, and missing a serial comma, an extra comma after "this web site", I think it needs a comma after "by any method", but I'd have to see what Strunk & White say on the subject. And "per printed hard copy page per copy" is redundant. A printed hard copy page is a single copy by definition.
But my favorite part is this: not only is there no robots.txt (still), but also nowhere in the page source are there any meta tag to indicate that the document should not be cached, so by viewing the page, you are committing an act which the license claims would require payment of $5,000, and by viewing it through AOL, you also cause AOL to commit an act (caching) which the license claims would require payment of $5,000. And by viewing it through AOL using the Google cache, you cause both companies to owe $5,000. Just in case you think that she might have been smart enough (yeah, right) to set it in the headers, here are the headers for the web page:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:25:33 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:15:52 GMT
ETag: "10d27b-f53b-45fac2b8"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 62779
Content-Type: text/html
Notice anything missing? Like a Cache-Control directive?
Here's a hint: this woman is a nearly computer-illiterate neophyte who posted tons of content online without any real understanding of how the internet works, and now is pissed off because of her own carelessness. Ignorance of the way the net operates is not a defense, folks.
There. I've copied a portion of the site contents. She'll probably sue me, too. I'm glad we have SLAPP laws here....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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