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

The site in question?

[John3]

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[BJH]

Gotta love it:

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)

This notice is posted (where else?) on her web site...

Re:Posted notice?

[dgatwood]

Worse, when you click the policy link, this nutjob asks you (without swowing the policy) whether you agree. Then, if you click cancel, it tells you that by even looking at this site, you have already agreed, and the only option is "Ok", after which it takes you to the page where you can actually see what you just agreed to.

As such, even if contracts were binding upon spiders (which they should not be), this is not a legitimate contract because it is not possible to read the contract prior to agreeing to it. IMHO, all the archive.org people should have to do is videotape someone clicking the policy link and show it to the judge, and she will be thrown out of court on her you-know-what.

.

Re:Posted notice?

[jrockway]

The case isn't about copying, it's about the act of spidering.

Also, if copying is illegal, what about copying the website to your browser cache when you display the page? Let's ban that; that will be GREAT for the web.

Much more about Suzannne Shell (fun to read!)

[Diordna]

Oh, don't worry, there's more on page 2 (emphasis mine):

In 1974, when Suzanne Shell was seventeen years old, her father punched her in the face...despite being a straight-A student, a cheerleader and a member of the marching band at her Minnesota high school, she was labeled an "out-of-control teenager" and placed in a foster home for her entire senior year...At seventeen, she also gave birth to a daughter that she gave up for adoption.

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:

• "Every phone call that goes in or out of my house is recorded."
• She's with the "pro-spanking, home-schooling, families-first forces."
• "Shell urges her readers not to cooperate with the child-protection system at any level."
• "If you see a child whom you suspect of being neglected or abused, you probably shouldn't report it...since the kid could be victimized further in foster care."
• "Tape everything. If it looks like the brutes might try to remove your precious dumplings from the home, hide them. If they snatch Junior anyway, plant a bug in his teddy bear so you can monitor what goes on in the foster home."

And look how effective she is!

"I don't think I've ever had a case where she's been involved where we have not ended up terminating parental rights," says Rocco Meconi, Shell's nemesis in Fremont County.

Heck, this belongs on Fark not Slashdot.

Re:Maybe I'm new here...

[Blakey Rat]

As a devil's advocate, though, what enforcement is there of robots.txt?

I could easily write a program that runs on my workstation and completely ignores it. In fact, I have a offline-browser that downloads sites and *does* completely ignore it while spidering for which pages to download (I won't name names.) There's nothing technical requiring spiders to honor it, presumably there's no legal system to honor it, it's all just trust.

Next time this comes up in court, the case might be a much more interesting, "I had a robots.txt file, but [search engine] ignored it!"

Anyone notice....

[Shaltenn]

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?