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

By reading this post...

[RealGrouchy]

...you agree not to mod me down for being First Post!

- RG>

Re:By reading this post...

[D'Sphitz]

looks like archive.org aren't the only one's she's tried to extort:

http://nextfriend.christiancommonlaw-gov.org/nextf riend.us//mail/Cease%20and%20Desist2.eml

...Second. . .you and/or your agents have stolen content from my web site, circumventing copy protections in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and posted the stolen content on another web site (thetruthistold.com). Fair use is predicated upon first legally obtaining the copy from which you quote. You did not obtain the content legally. According to the terms published on my web site for use of that content, for failure to prepay for the first copy, you owe me $250,000 plus $50,000 penalty and treble damages. I will enforce these terms in a court of law. This is a demand for payment, jointly and severally. I'll give you 30 days. I highly recommend you make payment or arrangements with me immediately. Mr. Wiseman is name because he designed the web site and circumvented the protections and acted at the direct of Mr. Stewart and Mr. Kiefer. Mr. Stewart also owns the domains and/or web site. Mr. Kiefer is the subject of the stolen content and therefore directed the misappropriation....

Lots more on this bitch here:
http://nextfriend.us/mail
http://thetruthistold.com/Shejjll.htm

Posted notice?

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[ZakuSage]

Don't read this post.

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[jokestress]

FYI, the Susanne Shell website Profane Justice. It's got that crazy Time Cube type font usage, indicating a high kook factor.

Re:Posted notice?

[modecx]

What a stupid bitch. I'm ashamed to live in the same state as her.

The way I see it, there are certain ways to make sure spiders don't index your pages, and we should agree that if one is smart enough to put a web site on the net, one should also be smart enough to learn how these work. Good spiders like any of the major search engines and archive.org will restrain themselves if you setup a robots.txt file (or meta tags) that tell them they aren't welcome.

If she really didn't want her data to be copied, she should have stuck it in a password protected directory, and she could have made her nifty copyright exclusion/contract agreement to apply after users entered the supplied passwords.

Re:Posted notice?

[gEvil (beta)]

OK

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ol ernqvat guvf lbh nterr gb abg nggrzcg nal qrpelcgvba bs guvf cbfg.

Re:Posted notice?

[jrockway]

A case should be thrown out even if robots.txt was ignored. What if robots.txt contains a parse error or was temporarily inaccessible?

If you want something published on the public internet to be private, require viewers to enter a password or present a cryptographic certificate. Everything else is public.

Re:Posted notice?

[zippthorne]

There is a link to the copyright notice, but it has a clickthrough which requires you to agree to the copyright terms before allowing you to see them.

Re:Posted notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about keeping something private. To demand that people not look at unprotected webpages would indeed be ludicrous (although it has been tried more than once.) It's about making copies for other people: You can't go around the web and copy other people's websites. If you don't believe me, register a domain and make a copy of cnet.com.

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[Original Replica]

If you want something published on the public internet to be private,

Then don't post it on the internet. Just like if you don't want people to see you in your underwear you should stand in your front yard in just your underwear holding a sign saying "Don't look at me". The space might be private, but the view is public.

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?

[Qzukk]

While I agree with you in principle, the law suggests that she did post the notice correctly, since (from what I gathered FTFA) the law doesn't make any distinctions between a human eyeball and a robot eyeball.

Except that if you don't agree to it (pressing Cancel when the javascript tells you that if you continue, you agree to it) you're taken to a page that says that you have agreed to it.

I wonder if duress (compelling the user to agree regardless of their wishes) is grounds for a lawsuit by itself, or if you have to wait until the contract you entered under duress causes some damage to you.

Re:Posted notice?

[sabernet]

Archive.org is archiving websites. All credit to the author, etc... remain. Equally, Archive.org is not profiting from the mirrored copy. Upon request, archive.org can and most probably will remove the copy from their site.

As has been stated before, you save a copy of all websites you visit. It's called cache. Archive.org could be seen as a computer browser with a robotic viewer and a bigass cache folder.

Equally, the internet works on the premise that the information is -out there-. If the site existed only in a local intranet, then that would be a different story. This site was published to be seen and, by extension, copied, as so long as the rights of the content provider are upheld.

If you don't want your site copied, DON'T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. Or, at the very least, put some level of protection on it. A human-only readable notice does not protection make. Otherwise, you are defaulting to a "copy me" state, as that is the default state of http. She has the right, however, as the copyright holder, to ask that all copies be purged.

To use a real world analogue. Say you go golfing. While golfing, you hear "FORE!" but keep playing. A golf ball smacks you in the head and you get a concussion, the extent of which prohibits you from going to work that week. Can you sue the golf course or the golfer(assuming he wasn't maliciously attempting to zing you across the skull)? No. You did not have a reasonable expectation not to be around flying white harbingers of pain. If you go golfing at a golf course, any reasonable person knows that there will be other golfers. So you accept the possibility and the consequences.

When you publish to the internet, your site will be copied. If someone you don't like does it too, you have no right to bitch about it. You published it out to be seen by the world. It's out there now. Too bad. However, as the copyright holder, you reserve the right to approach one of the copiers and ask, "I wish for you to delete that." The copier may have fair use defenses for it or may end up deleting it out of respect. Equally, as the copyright holder, you can definitely say, "That copy you have, you can't make money off it or take credit for it or deface it in any way or hide its source." Archive.org is not doing anything of the sort.

This, of course, is ignoring the fact that this woman more then likely has used a search engine at least once in her life. As a result, should she attest that these activities are illegal, it means she willingly participated in a query of a database doing that which she believes is wrong. That is not only hypocritical, but downright vile and questionably as illegal as that which she is alleging.

I'm not quite sure if you were playing devil's advocate or are actually an RIAA-worthy ignorant copyright Nazi, but either way, you definitely didn't put much thought into your post.

Re:Posted notice?

[nuzak]

I can claim that if you speak to any words containing vowels to me that you're entering into a contract. It doesn't make it the slightest bit so.

Either she has the world's dumbest lawyer (RICO charges? please), or she's filing pro se (see previous about world's dumbest lawyer). In either case she's an ideal test case for the webcrawlers, because she will almost certainly get completely demolished in court.

She might have a copyright claim, but she couldn't even get that one up the steps. Did she even file for infringement?

Re:Posted notice?

[binford2k]

She filed pro se.

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

Re:Posted notice?

[sabernet]

Then copyright is inherently contradictory to the modern internet. By publishing my content, I fully expect and depend on that content being distributed. And in the internet world without paper, that means copied data. Anyone using an accelerator, site guard for children, VNC client, thin client, etc... are effectively viewing sometimes reprocessed but invariably republished version of the site the parent machine looked up.

If an agent of the RIAA were to blanket a whole block with one of their songs, they do not have the right to collect royalties or payment from the denizens who resided within that block had they not agreed to the blanketing in the first place. That is broadcast law. But they do have the right, as copyright holders, to disallow anyone from making a tape of said broadcast.

Now, if the RIAA broadcasted their song with a sign saying, "RECORD ME", they lose that right to take the one guy with a tape recorder(and bad taste in music) to court.

The Internet is a defaulted "RECORD ME". Unless you don't want it seen by anyone. At which point you're in intranet territory. But even there, you would be stating RECORD ME to all persons within the intranet.

I won't lie and state that copyright law as it is has any clue in the modern world of information exchange. But certainly, this isn't blanket copyright infringement. And apparently, the legal system agrees:

A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges

However, she isn't even challenging on the basis of copyright infringement. She is suing pertaining to a shrink wrap EULA of, "By viewing this site, of which you must be viewing to read this, you agree to the following..." which have been thrown out in the past in the cases of Microsoft and Symantec software licenses anyways.

Re:Posted notice?

[jlarocco]

No, that's exactly what it means. Especially in the day of publishing on the web, where when you decide to stop pulishing, it's gone. If you publish a book and sell it, whoever bought the book can come back to it over and over. If you remove your webpage it's gone -- unless some asshat corporation (non-profit or otherwise) comes along and decides to republish your content without your permission. Archive.org, Google, etc. are massive copyright violators. It's not for you to dictate to me the method I have to use to tell you not to violate my rights. Being indexed should be opt-in. Just like being spammed. Being employed. Being in a relationship. Being called by telemarketers.

Oops! Looks like somebody doesn't understand the internet.

Robots.txt is the way to block web spiders from your site. That's not somebody "dictating your rights", that just the way it fucking works. It dictates your rights the same way a steering wheel dictates the way you have to steer your car. You don't have to use it, but your solution probably won't work, and you'll look like a moron. When you have a blank or non-existant robots.txt, it's understood by billions of people on the internet that you don't mind if web spiders crawl your site and add it to their index, make cached copies, etc. That's the way it was designed, and that's the way its worked from the very beginning. It's not rocket science.

Also, every person who visits your site gets a complete copy of the pages they visit in their browser cache. Once your page is cached in my browser, I have that information forever. I can delete it, view it, save it to CD, make a PDF, etc. Just like the person who owns a book that's no longer published. There's not some magic "delete fairy" who goes around deleting everyone's browser cache when you decide to delete a page.

Maybe not everyone knows about their browser cache or robots.txt, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. You can't change the way the internet works because a bunch of morons failed to do even the most basic research before throwing their crap on the web.

Re:Posted notice?

[shmlco]

"But certainly, that "well understood" robots.txt file that gets you oozing in your shorts, could be used for opt-in as easily as the advertising parasites, I mean the search engines, want it to be used for opt-out."

Now there's a thought. If no robots.txt, no opt-in. I like it, if only for the fact that millions of personal and junk pages will be thrown out of the search engine's results, making useful content easier to find.

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.

Re:Posted notice?

[General Wesc]

As has been stated before, you save a copy of all websites you visit. It's called cache. Archive.org could be seen as a computer browser with a robotic viewer and a bigass cache folder.

Yes, I save a copy on my computer for my own use. Archive.org doesn't just have a single robotic viewer. It also has thousands of human users. It's a bigass public cache folder.

Re:Posted notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Upon request, archive.org can and most probably will remove the copy from their site.

I'll verify archive.org do remove content quite quickly. A friend of mine was being stalked, and while she'd removed the pages on her site that had more information than she'd wanted about herself online publicly (a mistake she made in 1999 putting the pages up), archive.org kept a copy. According to their FAQ, putting a denial in robots.txt would not only stop her site being crawled, but remove old archived pages from their archive - so she added a relevant robots.txt entry that denied archive.org access, and submitted her site to their crawl engine again.

Within minutes a horde of archive.org bots from different archive.org crawl servers descended on her site, reading that robots.txt file. Within 15 minutes some archive.org searches for her domain came up with their "We're sorry, access to $SITENAME has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt" message, and after 24 hours and more crawls, all searches came up negative. Now, archive.org checks robots.txt daily, and crawls no further than that.

There's no guarantee of getting rid of anything you publish online of course, whether it be a webpage, newsgroup post, email or IM, but archive.org do the right thing there, automatically and quickly.

Re:Posted notice?

[BakaHoushi]

I think this needs to be in a pamphlet delivered to... everyone in the world. The Internet is a public place. Yes, you may have rights over a part you've designed/created, but it's still supposed to be for public viewing. Like an artist "owns" the work he gives to an art gallery, but can't tell people how to look at or think about it. He can't deny people the right to be inspired by said work. Much how you can tell someone they can't copy your website to make an identical website and claim it as his own. But that's not what Archive.org does. It merely records what WAS there. It doesn't create a new website. It doesn't claim to own the material. Web crawlers can't tell what websites want to be crawled and they can't negotiate contracts.

And one thing still bothers me. I consider there to be justified and unjustified lawsuits. A justified lawsuit is when someone is actually damaged in some way by the actions or inactions of another that could have and should have been avoided (as an example, my father took a nasty fall 2 years ago when a regular customer of his failed to mention the work that was being done on the floor inside. HE stepped in and fell right onto his shoulder, requiring massive amounts of surgery and time to heal, putting us out of business for quite some time. He was never notified of this work, and, in fact, my father was not even the first one to fall. We were forced to sue to pay for medical costs and to cover the expenses of being out of work).

In this woman's case... okay, so a crawler has been copying old copies of her webpage. So what? Who gives a fuck? I know there needn't be an actual bit of damage for a lawsuit, but the fact that people can and WILL sue when nothing bad has happened to them... it just makes me sick.

Re:Posted notice?

[dgatwood]

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....

Re:Posted notice?

[julesh]

She filed pro se.

Idiot for a lawyer and an idiot for a client. It's not going to go well for her, is it?

I mean, just how did she figure she'd get away with charges for "civil theft" (generally defined as "taking property with the intent of permanently depriving its rightful owner of its use") or "conversion" (which also relates to taking property) when no property was taken? And RICO without a racket?

The contract claim will clearly fail -- reading between the lines of the document you link, it was essentially only not struck out at this stage because the court wasn't allowed to consider the evidence presented by Internet Archive that they hadn't seen the notice of the contract.

That leaves only the copyright claim, and I think it's pretty clear that Internet Archive's use is fair use.

Re:Posted notice?

[SnowZero]

She essentially uses the same fiction that underlies the GPL: If you copy, you are assumed to have agreed to the license terms.

And you demonstrate a commonly held, yet totally incorrect misconception of the GPL. You can copy GPL'ed code all you want, as it is only a limit on DISTRIBUTION, not COPYING. If that's a fiction, then a copyright notice with "All rights reserved" is also meaningless. Why don't you try to sell that view to the RIAA/MPAA?

This woman seems to be angry just at the mere fact that it's been copied, and not with any occurrence of distribution. In a GPL violation case, one normally asks for compliance or a cessation of distribution, trying to work something out before launching into a lawsuit. That's because the violation may have been totally accidental (as it would be with a spider with no robots.txt present), and even if you "won" the lawsuit, your tiny award would not cover the costs. So, if she didn't first ask archive.org to remove the material, she'll have a difficult time showing she was acting with any good faith.

Re:Posted notice?

[supersat]

Reading the order to dismiss, a few things come to light:

1. After she sent the Internet Archive an email demanding payment of $100,000, the Internet Archive sued to have their actions declared legal.
2. She is proceeding pro se, most likely because she got caught off-guard by the Internet Archive's legal action. Still, you can't go around demanding $100,000 without expecting a legal response.
3. One of her counterclaims was for copyright infringment. However, the Internet Archive did not move to have that counterclaim dismissed.

Re:Posted notice?

[PeelBoy]

Looks like a virus to me. You just had to copy and paste it here, didn't you? Thanks now we're all screwed.

If she didn't want it crawled..

[Red Cape]

she should have put a password on it.

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:robots.txt

[DogDude]

I suppose she expects us (programmers) to rush out and perfect natural language processing so all our spiders can read her stupid notice.

No, I think that if you spent about 5 seconds reading her web site, you'd see that she's mentally ill. I don't think it's appropriate to bash people like this, when they clearly don't have a good grip on reality.

Maybe I'm new here...

[His name cannot be s]

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.

Re:Maybe I'm new here...

[Billy the Impaler]

And even if they did, why the fuck didn't she use a ROBOTS.TXT file? Isn't that what it's for?

Clearly she should have. However, she didn't and that's the issue at stake here. Is ignorance of the procedure an excuse?

Re:Maybe I'm new here...

[Overzeetop]

Clearly she should have. However, she didn't and that's the issue at stake here. Is ignorance of the procedure an excuse?

No it's not an excuse. By placing her information on the internet, she must comply with the standards of the internet. The important thing is that there was a legitimate way to prevent this which she could have implemented, but she didn't. Just as the cartoon advertisement got in a shitload of trouble in Boston. It's not that they weren't allowed, but rather they simply needed to file the proper form.

If you were to use a felt tip marker to put your copytight notice on a braille flyer, but didn't put the notice in braille, and someone who read the braille and was incapable of reading the marker then sent that notice to their friends, I suspect they would not be in violation of the copyright notice.

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!"

Re:Maybe I'm new here...

[ginotech]

If it ignored robots.txt, she'd have some sort of a case. the whole point is that she didn't even have a robots.txt

i'd also like to point out that the spam prevention word for this post was "sucked"

Re:Maybe I'm new here...

[cgenman]

A robots.txt file is not a contract or a technical restriction, but rather the standard means of communicating behaviors that contradict the inherent technical structure of the internet. If someone ignores your robots.txt file, that in and of itself is not a violation of anything. But it does mean that you have properly stated your policy. Your policy may not have the force of law (and by many accounts, it shouldn't), but if you don't state that policy in the proper form it can be assumed to have no force, rather than just that the enforcability of the policy must be examined.

As an example, having a website is like having a store. If you leave the front door of your store open, with the lights on, and someone inside, entering is not a tresspass. If you put a small lock on that door, no matter how easy to pick, entering that store becomes tresspass. If you put a huge sign on the door that says "door lock is broken, private property, KEEP OUT," then entering that store is very probably tresspass, unless you're blind. Putting up a huge sign on the door that says "DO NOT ENTER", but doing so in braille, will probably not count as sufficient warning.

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:The site in question?

[Blue Stone]

Interesting. From her copyright page:

"Copyright 1996- 2007, Suzanne Shell
The content if this web site is intended to generate income [...]"

But from her contact us page, her PGP signature:

"Here is our public key for encrypting messages to us.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGP 8.1 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com [snip]"

Re:The site in question?

[ColdWetDog]

Oh, and Ms. Shell, 1996 called. They want their website design back.

No, they don't.

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.

World is bigger than the US...

[Splab]

' 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.

Re:it would actually be nice if ...

[xSquaredAdmin]

She did request that they did, and they did so. Then she asked them for $100,000 in compensation for copying in the first place. You can read more here.

Statute of Frauds

[gravesb]

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.

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:it would actually be nice if ...

[Looke]

Technically speaking, yeah, sure it's a "copy". You don't have the copyright for it, so you're not allowed to re-publish it. That's what Archive.org is doing.

Big deal?

[MindStalker]

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.

I wonder if she has an answering machine.

[SharpFang]

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.

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.

A more relevant link

[MillionthMonkey]

Check out her current robots.txt file.

My goodness, what an eyesore...

[Magneon]

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.

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?

Problemm not isolated

[failedlogic]

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?

Re:Problemm not isolated

[proberts]

If you act responsibly, then you have nothing to fear. If you don't, why are you so worried about people finding out who the "real" you is? The real problem is people not taking responsibility for their actions.

If there was an "easier way to remove this information" it'd become the most massive denial of service vector available on the Internet. Unscroupulous individuals would use it to remove information about their competitors or negative information about themselves. Can you imagine the consumer rating sites which actually help people avoid scanners being deluged by rip-off artists wanting to remove their negative ratings?

Paul

i wonder

[phoenixwade]

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.....

Suzanne Shell - Think of The Children!!!11!1

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

mitigating circumstances: she's pro-child abuse

[NIckGorton]

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

Re:mitigating circumstances: she's pro-child abuse

[Just Some Guy]

She's basically providing information for people trying to resist intervention from child protective services.

In some places, I think that's entirely appropriate. I might have agreed with you until I watched a friend get accused of sexually abusing his kids by his crackhead ex wife. He's complied with ever detail of the law, and even though no evidence exists against him, he'll still probably not see his kids again unless they decide later in life to contact him.

Frankly, he would have been in far less trouble had he simply killed his ex and disappeared with the kids.

While I'm not saying that CPS is universally bad, I do know that I'll never again live in Missouri after seeing how they routinely shred the constitution "for the children".

Re:What contract?

[proberts]

"Way past fair use" is a matter for the courts to decide- however the since it's an archive, their defense is likely argued under the "Reproduction rights of libraries and archives" provisions of 17USC108, in whcih case fair use doctrine really doesn't come in to play. Since fair use is for subsections of copyrighted content and not the entire content I think that's not where this is headed. Caches may argue under fair use, since the excerpt is per-page not per-site (though it gets tricky if the site has one page.)

Here's the relevant text:

"Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if -- "

Section (b) generally refers to an unpublished work- making your site available to the public on the Internet likely kills that clause. Section (c) deals with replacing damaged copies or works which also doesn't seem to apply.

As far as I can see, only the copyright owner's right to control distribution applies, and since archive.org removed the content at the copyright owner's request, I can't see any damage suffered and I doubt a court will either.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on the 'Net.

Re:Allow me to preempt the next 500 posts

[ckedge]

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.

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:SITE SLASHDOTTED

[zakezuke]

Suzanne Shell
[address snipped]
Elbert, CO 80106
719.[snipped]

For those looking to share your views, Suzanne has asked that we continue to contact her organization at her official "non-web" addresses. edits mine

"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." --http://www.profane-justice.org/

I highly doubt that Suzanne wants /. fanboys to phone her and harass her for no justified reason. I can understand the slashdot effect being annoying, but one could argue she did seek publicity and sueing wayback for archiving her site is at least newsworthy on slashdot, digg.com, and informationweek.com. I can not believe all this traffic is as she puts it on her site "INTENDED to shut this site down", but rather people read slashdot/digg/informationweek and were simply curious. Like others I wanted to see if she had a robots.txt file. But I don't think it's appropriate to contact her in matters unrelated to her business, nor do I feel that contacting her regarding her current lawsuit would be helpful.

Even if you dislike her actions against archive.org, I would say that any form of harassment only hurts archive.org .

Disclaimer: IANAL / Use it against them.

[Xenographic]

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.

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 :] 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?

So, um...

[linefeed0]

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?

Suzannne Shell damaging but real problems exist

[evought]

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).

[DISCLAIMER] for her site should be

[freaker_TuC]

By visiting this site you can get narcoleptic, get heavy glaucoma or any eye vision impared disease. If you feel nausia, tense chest pains, major headaches, need to vomit or having muscle cramps; CONSULT A PHYSICIAN IMMEDIATELY! DO NOT WAIT!

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

W E E BBB D E S I G NN

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 ;) soon she will sue me! lady, get a new web interiour designer because ... damn!

Re:This is so stupid

[Skreems]

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.

Preemptive strike

[BillX]

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>

Re:This is so stupid

[Doddman]

One reason I love mozilla firefox so much is the NoScript plugin. Because I was never presented with such a dialouge (because I had javascript blocked), and therefore never agreed to it, am I still bound as such?

What we should really be worried about....

[ThelpDealio]

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.

Re:Why not change the crawlers

[bradkittenbrink]

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?

Yes, it would be hard. However the technical problems would certainly be solvable for a company like google. The real problem is that this would serve to further entrench google's monopoly on search. I love google as much as the next guy, but I certainly don't want to start introducing measures that will make it more difficult for a google-killer to arise.

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.

That's the worst analogy I've ever heard that didn't fulfill Godwin's Law. The web was designed to be a public place for the sharing of information. Trying to think of it like the inside of someone's house is just going to lead you in the wrong direction. A much better analogy would be that information posted on the web is like a campaign poster or some other notice posted on someone's lawn. Yes, it's hosted on private property and the information posted there belongs to the person posting it, but it is displayed publicly and acting as if it weren't is just silly.

Their site posts directions on not being crawled

[ocdude]

Robots.txt is a simple file one can put on their site to not have it crawled. Archive.org even posts what to put in a robots.txt file to prevent their bot from crawling one's site:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

If robots.txt is not an option, they have instructions on how to contact them to have your site removed from their indexes, found here. There really is no excuse for having content that you want not to be crawled open to be crawled nowadays.

Re:Why not change the crawlers

[zotz]

"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?"

I guess you could, you could just as easily put terms in the licenses of web servers that state that by using the web server software, you agree to let all your documents be crawled except where you deny that with .... wait for it .... robots.txt.

That wouldn't be too hard either would it?

all the best,

drew

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcaf2ThG7q4
UFO seen in skies over Winton!

Re:no, I'm obligated to have a door

[DavidTC]

Her web pages appear to be HTML.

Wow, look at that. Right in the damn HTML4 spec:

The robots.txt file

When a Robot visits a Web site, say http://www.foobar.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.foobar.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyze its contents to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document. You can customize the robots.txt file to apply only to specific robots, and to disallow access to specific directories or files.

robots.txt, and the meta tag defined later in the same document, are indeed rules.

Re:This is so stupid

[cheater512]

Plus there are very well known ways to prevent spiders from spidering you. Robots.txt does the job very well.

You've obviously all missed

[peepleperson]

the part in her copyright page - http://www.profane-justice.org/html/copyright_.htm l - where she states:

When we receive payment for copyright infringement or obtain a court judgment and collect on it, you will earn 5% of the amount which is collected as actual damages. In the event of multiple identical submissions, the first one received by AFAC will receive the reward. The reward is paid only for the actual pages for which we receive payment or collect on a judgment. In our most recent infringement claim, the total actual damages for copyright infringement is $600,000 - which meant you would have earned $30,000!

I'm reporting all of you for cacheing her site in your browsers.

Rich at last! Muwahahahahahaha.

Re:it would actually be nice if ...

[Xtifr]

Except that the rules are different for libraries and archives, and the Internet Archive is a non-profit, registered member of the American Library Association, primarily funded by the Smithsonian Institution. Libraries routinely make copies for archival purposes (i.e. transferring newspapers to microfiche), and their right to do so is spelled out in the copyright laws. What she's done is the equivalent of putting "Anyone who reads this must pay the author five dollars" at the beginning of a book, then suing a library which carries a copy of that book. (Or, for a slightly closer analogy, placing a classified ad in a local newspaper with a notice that anyone who copies it must pay you, and then suing the local library for their microfiched copy of the newspaper.)

If she were to sue anyone, she should have sued Google, who, as a for-profit information service selling advertisements, cannot claim to be a public library, and whose copy of her site is every bit as much a re-publication as the Archive's, but without the defenses spelled out in copyright law that the Archive has.

Slashdotted

[dangitman]

Can someone please republish this site on a mirror?

Not computer illeterate, a set-up

[StrangerX]

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

[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

Or a more realistic situation

[lorcha]

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.

semiPro Se too...

[vague_ascetic]

US Court of Appeasls for the Tenth District (html doc online)

• Suzanne Shell, Plaintiff,
• and
• April Fields, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

• Rocco F. Meconi, individually and officially;
• Fremont County Colorado Department of Human Services, officially;
• Steve Clifton, individually and officially;
• Dawn Rivas, individually and officially;
• Todd Hanenberg, individually and officially;
• Dan C. Kender, individually;
• Anna Hall Owen, individually and officially,
• Defendants-Appellees,

and

• Fremont County District Court,
• Defendant.

• No. 04-1133
• (D.C. No. 03-RB-743 (MJW))
• (D. Colo.)

• No. 04-1155
• (D.C. No. 03-RB-743 (MJW))
• (D. Colo.)

• • 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:

    1. Preparing, providing or otherwise generating any legal documents;

    1. Providing any legal advice to [Ms. Fields], regardless of whether she (Suzanne Shell) characterizes it as legal advice or counseling;

    1. . . . having any relationship or contact with [Ms. Fields] at all; [and]

    1. . . . exercising, in any way, the rights or authority expressed in the power of attorney given to her by [Ms. Fields] . . . .