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

robots.txt

[knothead99]

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[spellraiser]

No, she didn't post the notice properly:

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.

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.

A bit about Suzanne Shell

[shark72]

She's quite a a firecracker. From http://www.westword.com/2005-02-10/news/beyond-con tempt/:

She's been ejected from courtrooms by judges and attacked in a hallway by a convicted child molester she was trying to capture on film. She's been arrested in Wisconsin for refusing to turn over her video equipment to a police officer and detained at the Colorado Springs Airport because she forgot to remove a .380-caliber pistol from her carry-on items.

Court dismissed most charges

[Sabotage]

It appears her site is at http://www.profane-justice.org/

Check out this article here: http://www.phillipsnizer.com/library/cases/lib_cas e456.cfm

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?

Re:Posted notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:Posted notice?

[binford2k]

She filed pro se.

http://www.phillipsnizer.com/library/cases/lib_cas e456.cfm

SITE SLASHDOTTED

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[MillionthMonkey]

robots.txt is a nice convention, but its absence doesn't allow anyone to break copyright. Where does that idea come from??

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!

I did not give legal advice to anyone. I did not use powers of attorney to represent anyone or give legal advice to anyone. As I testified, and which was not refuted, I used Powers of Attorney because I was previously accused of forging signatures on release of information forms. I started using powers of attorney to access the DHS records under an existing Colorado Children's Code statutory provision recognizing powers of attorney for that purpose, legislation which I influenced.

She needs a good spanking.

It's OK

[djtack]

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