Then why aren't these individuals pushing for change rather than the corporations?
Flippant answer: Who says we're not?
Serious answer: We are, but the corporations have much more money and private armies of lawyers, so they get noticed a lot more.
Whether or not large corporations abuse today's copyright framework to become rich middle-men doesn't change the fact that copyright also protects many smaller artists. Contrary to what you describe in your post, I work in a high-tech city and know many people who make their living solely through developing intellectual property, generally in the form of software, as sole traders or in small, privately-owned companies.
I hesitate to post this -- the last twice I entered discussions on Slashdot and disagreed with the popular "copyright = bad" sentiment I was systematically hit with (-1, Overrated) mods for several days -- but sometimes you just have to tell it like it is. In this case, I agree with you that corporations do abuse copyright and lobby for beneficial laws, but that doesn't imply that there are no little guys benefiting from the laws working as they were originally intended.
Your analogy is a little unfair. Factories require less manpower today because much of the mundane, manual labour can now be performed by machines and software, with results as good or better than what went before. Do you really think machines and software can write a gripping novel, paint a beautiful picture, or develop the next great computer game?
That will be viable as soon as we get back to a system where the costs and time required to duplicate and distribute infringing material on a wide scale are not marginally above 0. Otherwise, by the time the legal system reacts to an illegal act, the damage will typically have become permanent.
As is often pointed out around here, the world has moved on from the time when these laws were written, and in some ways the laws need to adapt to keep up. That partly means recognising the opportunities for artists to take advantage of the Internet, but it also means recognising and dealing with the danger presented by the Internet to the legitimate rights of those artists. So far, we haven't been very good at either.:-(
You don't think that the number of people here making and/or understanding the jokes about FORTRAN says more about the significance of Backus's contributions than any fawning obituary column ever could? Contrary to another poster's comment, I think most death really is sad, but since I didn't know Mr Backus personally, I prefer to reflect on what he contributed to society as a whole instead of displaying false grief.
So, remind me again how these bullet points help win AGAINST Linux?
They're talking points for use when marketing to a certain category of Linux user. In this case, ironically, I think Microsoft actually make quite a decent argument: in the business software world, a lot of the best stuff does only run on Windows today. You can argue whether this is down to Microsoft or the choices of the individual software vendors (except with things like Office, obviously) but that doesn't really matter if you're aiming at a group who are open-minded and simply looking for the best software for their business. Convincing someone who wanted to use Linux for ethical/philosophical reasons (another of their five categories) would be far harder, I should think.
I'm a keen driver, and a strong advocate of road safety, so I've looked at a fair bit of the research that's available. Most variables that have been found to affect driver attitude are based on something that is happening while they're actually in the car: things like tiredness, drink and drugs obviously have an effect, but so do things like the type (actually, speed) of music you're listening to. (Some groups of drivers also generally exercise better judgement regardless of the immediate circumstances: to find out who, take a look at what counts for/against you when your insurance premium is worked out!)
Then again, perception of speed is also affected by recent experience: think how slow it feels when you come off a high speed road into a town, even if you're doing the limit around town, and compare that with how that limit feels when you're just starting driving and already in town. That's perception rather than attitude and judgement, though.
So while the conclusions here seem plausible, they're also a bit unusual. I saw a story very similar to this a few days ago in the UK media. Anyone know if these are all the same thing, or there's a recent research trend generating several sets of results in quick succession?
I don't make personal calls while I am at work. Why should anyone else?
Because employees are human beings, with more important responsibilities that do not stop just because they are at work?
Because lots of essential services are only available during office hours?
Because people have breaks during the day, when they're not required to be working?
I'm not saying people should abuse the ability to make personal calls and spend all day chatting up their girlfriends/boyfriends/whatever, but sometimes you just need to communicate with other people during office hours, and other times a quick call to someone can make you feel much better. The smart employer respects this, and provides suitable facilities for personal calls to be made privately and without distracting others in the office. Your approach appears to be focussed on working 100% of the time during office hours, something which no human being can sustain productively anyway, at the expense of causing unnecessary inconvenience/concern to employees, which will actually decrease productivity.
Perhaps in your world. In my world the balance of power rests with employers not employees. Employees are a dime a dozen. The unexpected loss of an employee isn't going to have much impact on most companies. The loss of a job can be devestating to an employee. The employee usually only has one job and the employer usually has lots of employees.
Then we do indeed live in different worlds. In my world, the good people rarely have trouble finding a new job even in so-called employer's markets, while the costs to business both of losing good people and of recruiting new people are significant for even a single member of staff. In any case, this is beside the point, which is simply that treating employees respectfully as valued people gets far better results than a culture where every member of staff is just another human resource.
Don't knock it, we've finally found something a Herb Schildt book is good for. Given the very negative comments he often gets in book reviews, that's a welcome change!
I think you misunderstood. To make the links, you take about 5-6 inches of reel-to-reel tape, wrap it around to form a loop, and then seal it with a bit of sticky tape. Then you take the next piece of reel-to-reel, and loop it through the first before sealing it, thus forming the link. The prior art the GPP mentioned is found in every school for five-year-olds in the country, around 15 December every year, and has been since long before your new-fangled punch cards were invented!:-)
The after-publication stuff is due to exclusivity deals, yes. My point was that researchers are now very reluctant even to put up preprints. Publishers hear that something has been put on-line, and because of the archive sites, some won't consider publishing it at all, where before they might at worst ask the author to remove it from their own web site for a few months after the journal was published.
In other words, because sites like archive.org are redefining what publishing on a web site means in practice, people are now refusing to publish on their web sites at all. This is not a plus for either the authors or the public, nor even for archive.org since it will never get a copy of any of these papers either way. This is a textbook example of why we have copyright: by undermining it here, the author's incentive to distribute is diminished, and works are not being shared.
This is not some hypothetical argument, BTW. I live in Cambridge, UK and know many people who work at the university both personally and professionally, and this reluctance to put anything on personal web sites is becoming widespread as a direct result of caching and archiving, and their consequences for the author's ability to get published.
You make an interesting comment about the use being transformative; I've never seen it framed that way before. I'm not sure I personally buy it -- I'm not entirely convinced that the use there is different enough from the normal use of the data to be a genuinely new thing -- but it's certainly a fair argument to make.
I'd agree with the non-commercial factor. (A more interesting case there would be someone like Google, who makes money through the advertising on its various services, but offers them for no direct cost to the public. I would take this to be commercial, but perhaps a good lawyer could argue otherwise.)
I'm not sure about significant market impact. I can think of plenty of cases where sites deliberately put up material temporarily, but charge for access to their archives as a way of funding the new content, for example. Permitting archive.org to reproduce such material would undermine the existing business model. That would have a direct impact on the value of the company's existing archives. It could also be against the public interest, since it might drive the company to switch to (for example) a subscription model where no content was freely available without a paid-for account, thus reducing the amount of information freely available on the web.
It would certainly be an interesting court case if archive.org was ever challenged in isolation (without the attendant contractual shenanigans we seem to have in this case). Even then, though, it would be tough to read any precedents into the result either way. One of the nice things about US fair use law is that it pretty much requires each case to be considered on its own merits, but that does have a downside as far as clarifying the law for others goes.
Everyone is naive in some field. Are you an accountant, a lawyer, an electrical engineer, a road safety researcher, a trained negotiator, a computer expert, and a pilot? Probably not, but chances are that you rely on the expertise of people who are everyday. Luckily we have developed a society where people with different specialisms can interact, and share the benefits of what each can do.
In such a society, there will always be scope for a specialist to take advantage of a non-specialist. Thus we have developed things like consumer protection laws and business regulations. These laws aren't there to protect the stupid, they are there because no-one can know everything about everything.
So yes, I agree entirely that people should take a reasonable level of personal responsibility for their actions, and certainly far more than some nanny states have expected recently. I just prefer to keep this in perspective, and recognise that no-one is a universal expert, and therefore laws should be framed to support non-experts too.
Arguing the state of things, any of your examples are handled by archive.org's deletion policy. Don't like it, they'll delete it.
And what about the next archive site, and the next one, and the other one you never even heard of? You can't have a principle of copyright that says that someone has the right to control the reproduction of their work, and then say that the copyright holder must opt-out or manually delete their own work from an arbitrary number of sites according to each site's own policies or they effectively relinquish their copyright. That position is inconsistent.
Now, you could argue about the relative merits of copyright vs. other approaches to compensating artists and encouraging distribution, and I'd be happy to discuss them with you. But right now, copyright is what we have, and the behaviour of sites like archive.org undermines it and unbalances the system. It's already harder to get academic papers on-line than it used to be, because researchers are reluctant to post copies on their own sites before publication for fear of never being published, and afterwards they're tied down by other legal restrictions from the publishers.
Arguing that you can prevent dissemination of info is ridiculous.
On the contrary. Copyright exists, according to one school of thought (which includes the US Constitution), precisely because it is necessary to incentivise artists enough that they will share their work. If sites like archive.org go around undermining that, and thus undermining the benefits that copyright provides, you get the sort of situation I described above where works never get put on the Internet in the first place. Then not only does archive.org not have it, but no-one else does either.
But I wouldn't just wager a non-trivial amount of money on a game where I had NO CLUE whatsoever what the rules were.
But my point is that, realistically, a lot of people will think they have a fair idea about the rules, but actually they don't, because right now there are services that are fundamentally operating outside the usual rules and getting away with it.
I've had similar discussions in the past about Usenet, where services like Deja/Google Groups developed archives over time. Geeks on Slashdot often reply that Usenet posts are not guaranteed to be deleted within any specific time frame, and that there are headers you can set to indicate that you don't want your post archived. That doesn't change the fact that most ISPs' Usenet servers, even today, will drop old posts after a few weeks, and it is therefore reasonable for someone who is not familiar with the higher geek voodoo to assume that this is how Usenet works and that anything they post will also be removed after a few days.
There are a few people in this thread that seem like the type of people who would accept a dinner invitation, then bitch about the menu and demand the host cook them something else.
In this case, and talking specifically about the copyright issue without comment on the dubious contract stuff, I think it's more like a vegetarian making a dinner booking at a restaurant, getting to the restaurant, finding that only meat dishes are on the menu, and being told they can't cancel their booking and have to pay anyway because they didn't say "vegetariosa" when they made the call to reserve a table... in a town where it's a legal requirement for all restaurants to provide a vegetarian alternative. But then I think in analogies too much.:-)
Consider personal homepages. On these, there may be a lot of minor pieces of personal information subject to disclosure over time, even if the user removes older posts after a while. A user unaware of the behaviour of archival services and the conventions involving robots.txt may not take steps to prevent that information being recorded permanently. Hell, they may not even have control over robots.txt, if their home page is being run on a third-party system and not hand-crafted.
Another possibility is that a user of a third-party blogging service may not appreciate the significance of some of the options, and may consequently reveal information publicly that they thought only a limited audience could see, until they realise their mistake and change the settings.
In either case, any damage caused by disclosing the information is effectively permanent and searchable once the formerly public information has been archived, even though the user was unaware of the risks at the time they posted it and took steps to remove the information when they found out.
Funny that all the examples you offer start out with someone making a mistake or using poor judgement, then you would have us believe that the liability for the resultant damage doesn't lie with them but rather an indexing site.
I didn't say that.
The internet is about broadcasting information, yet you would have us believe that it's important that no one listen.
I didn't say that, either.
However, it is undeniable that these archival services are treading on thin legal ice at best. It is also undeniable that as a result of their legally dubious actions, further damage may be done, possibly much greater than the damage caused by the original error. Of course the original blame lies with the person who made the error in judgement, but that doesn't mean we should give anyone else who ever takes advantage of that error a free pass on any moral or legal consequences of their actions. Other areas of the law are not so naive, so why should this one be special?
Have you ever seen what happens to someone who's the victim of identity theft? When that happens, that someone's life gets turned upside down, often for several months. People lose money, jobs, even homes. Alarmist bullshit? Not if you've seen it happen to someone close to you and watched them pick up the pieces. And that has nothing to do with archives scanning pages at unfortunate times, and everything to do with storing enough old information that someone willing to spend a bit of time can piece together enough of someone else's life to impersonate them well enough to get a foot in the door.
As for robots.txt, I have already pointed out numerous times in this discussion that this is is not a legally sufficient argument. In this case, you also cite procedures for removing content, but if you actually read those procedures in detail, you'll find that entries such as the one for requests to remove personal data are far from clear about how they'll be handled. In any case, that is once again an unofficial standard rather than anything with the weight of law, and it is unreasonable to expect every copyright holder publishing on the web to familiarise themselves with an arbitrary number of unknown archival services' own standards for removing data they had no permission to keep in the first place.
You mock the GPs attempt at hyberbole... with a feeble attempt at statistics. Just admit it, you have no clue how many people know about robots.txt, and it doesn't matter. What matters is if they tried to obey a robots.txt file if it existed on the server and if she had one on her site. You are in no way qualified to talk about the vast majority of people, so spare us your speculation passed off as fact.
Have you even tried to work this out for yourself?
In terms of how many people know about robots.txt, there are currently ~100,000,000 domain names registered worldwide, studies suggest that fewer than 50% of these have any sort of robots.txt in place, and there will be a lot of duplication where one person runs multiple domain names. Looking at these numbers, it seems unrealistic to make claims about what "billions of people on the internet" understand.
Nor does it take a genius to verify my claims about the vast majority of Internet users. You can come at this from several angles. Look up the countries where most Internet users are based, and the proportion of the population in those countries that those users represent. Since big hitters like the US have a heavy majority of their population on-line now, it would require a very significant proportion of the population of those countries to be geeks if my claim was untrue. Do you believe this to be the case?
If you do, consider that estimates put around 25% of PCs attached to the Internet in at least one botnet right now. That's a pretty clear indication that around 25% of people on the Internet aren't even smart enough to configure an anti-virus product properly. Are you seriously going to tell me that in this world, knowledge of robots.txt is commonplace?
The whole point of a forum if to exchange ideas and information
Yes, it is, which is why inflammatory posts like both the GPP and yours have no place in it. The things you accuse me of doing are just like the things I picked up the GGP poster for. Your arguments are emotive, your logic is based on ad hominem attacks, and you are generally lowering the tone of the discussion. Now run along and read up on the subject, and post something constructive will you? I've got several other posts to reply to, all of which are more reasoned and interesting than yours.
Do you honestly not see the potential for harm caused by archiving everything that ever goes on the web? Here are a few possible examples, from the dramatic but rare to the much less dramatic but everyday:
A national security issue leaks onto the web, gets pulled quickly, but not before a few archive services have picked it up. Instead of containing the leak, confidential information is widely available to the wrong people for several hours, and someone gets killed as a result.
A company's internal data is inadvertently posted on the company web site, and then pulled. It was archived in the meantime. Investors lose a lot of money as word gets around and the company has no chance to fix the damage because people are reading about it on a copy of the company's site and not the real thing with the latest updates.
You know that time your daughter was sunbathing topless in the back yard, and the pervert next door was caught photographing her? Just because he was sent to jail and his ISP was ordered to take down his web site, that doesn't mean other perverts aren't jerking off over your daughter, or that she's OK about that.
(Insert related stories about Facebook stalking here.)
(Insert obligatory scare story about paedophiles grooming young kids by using information from the kids' insecure on-line diaries here.)
An employer/bank/lawyer/doctor's records are inadvertently placed on-line due to a clerical error and then pulled, but not before people's confidential medical/legal/financial records were plastered all over the net by these replicating archives.
Someone makes available a draft copy of their new article/book/script as a service to the community, intending to pull it when the final version goes to press. Unfortunately, no publisher will touch their work with a pole, after discovering that the draft is still available for free on-line in the archive systems. The public never gets the finished product, and the author loses out on any compensation for their hard work.
Someone writes a reasonable article on a controversial subject of interest, or simply makes a few unconnected posts to bulletin boards that over time reveal personal information like their religion, sexual preferences, etc. Five years later, a prospective employer's HR weenie, searching for background info, finds that article and takes offence because their personal views differ, or puts together the background info. Someone doesn't get a job, because of discrimination that would be unpleasant and inappropriate at best.
Someone writes an unreasonable or ill-informed article or post about something when they're young, which they probably don't even mean, but post anyway because they're showing off. (Statement of blindingly obvious: this is called "being young and innocent", and is the sort of thing most kids do a fair bit.) A few years later, this also comes up when they're looking for their first job, and they miss out on an interview because of something really stupid they once said but didn't mean.
I could give dozens more examples, but hopefully the point is made. Hell, there are even laws to protect the information in several of these cases, though in many places in the western world they concentrate on governments and businesses, and for bizarre reasons I've never understood, individual privacy is considered less important in law.
But if someone does have some valuable content they want to publish, even if it just on their ISP's web space, one would assume they would research the issue and possible precautions to take. I believe that's called due diligence, although IANAL so I don't know if that applies in the his case.
OK, I'm all for reasonable levels of personal responsibility, and I'm hardly a fan of the nanny state. However, no-one can ever protect themselves from everything all the time. The w
It is, however, the accepted method for detailing what spiders should avoid and what they are allowed to index.
But accepted by whom? Consider how dangerous it would be to set a legal precedent saying that permission could be implicitly granted in such a wide-ranging way, simply by failing to use a convention that the vast majority of Internet users have never heard of.
Are you suggesting that the notice would have standing if someone who only spoke spanish went to the site?
I'm not contending anything about the contractual notice at all. I think that whole issue is daft. I'm merely commenting on the copyright issue, and in that respect, no notice is required, in either the US or Spain.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote there, but nor do I see the problem here. Putting a web page on-line might reasonably be interpreted as granting permission for someone to download and view it. Arguing that it grants permission for any third party service to replicate and republish the entire web site -- effectively renouncing the copyright entirely -- is stretching that rather a lot, though, is it not?
Actually, I'm well aware of robots.txt, and my own web sites use it to specify the site organisers' preferences. This isn't about me, it's about the millions of people publishing information on the Internet, using ISPs providing services they've paid for, who through no fault (and, often, with no control) of their own may be damaged if this sort of issue isn't dealt with, or is dealt with in a way that assumes everyone knows all the higher geek voodoo involved.
The only jurisdiction that matters is the one Internet Archive is based in. I procede under the assumption that this is a US jurisdiction.
Agreed on both counts.
The US fair use exemption does allow for republication, specifically.
Of course it does. That is, after all, the point. But the nature of the reproduction is limited by the four criteria specified in the legislation. In general, it does not cover 100% reproduction of an original work in the same form and for the same purpose, which is what we're talking about here. I don't dispute either your example here or the Google example in your other post, but they are not the same as what we're talking about here.
Yes, it is. That doesn't mean that they have automatically accepted the terms of her contract
No it doesn't, and nothing I've posted anywhere in this thread says I believe her contractual shenanigans are appropriate. I am simply contending that this does not affect any earlier infringement that archive.org may have committed.
Slashdot Mirror
Flippant answer: Who says we're not?
Serious answer: We are, but the corporations have much more money and private armies of lawyers, so they get noticed a lot more.
Whether or not large corporations abuse today's copyright framework to become rich middle-men doesn't change the fact that copyright also protects many smaller artists. Contrary to what you describe in your post, I work in a high-tech city and know many people who make their living solely through developing intellectual property, generally in the form of software, as sole traders or in small, privately-owned companies.
I hesitate to post this -- the last twice I entered discussions on Slashdot and disagreed with the popular "copyright = bad" sentiment I was systematically hit with (-1, Overrated) mods for several days -- but sometimes you just have to tell it like it is. In this case, I agree with you that corporations do abuse copyright and lobby for beneficial laws, but that doesn't imply that there are no little guys benefiting from the laws working as they were originally intended.
Your analogy is a little unfair. Factories require less manpower today because much of the mundane, manual labour can now be performed by machines and software, with results as good or better than what went before. Do you really think machines and software can write a gripping novel, paint a beautiful picture, or develop the next great computer game?
That will be viable as soon as we get back to a system where the costs and time required to duplicate and distribute infringing material on a wide scale are not marginally above 0. Otherwise, by the time the legal system reacts to an illegal act, the damage will typically have become permanent.
As is often pointed out around here, the world has moved on from the time when these laws were written, and in some ways the laws need to adapt to keep up. That partly means recognising the opportunities for artists to take advantage of the Internet, but it also means recognising and dealing with the danger presented by the Internet to the legitimate rights of those artists. So far, we haven't been very good at either. :-(
You don't think that the number of people here making and/or understanding the jokes about FORTRAN says more about the significance of Backus's contributions than any fawning obituary column ever could? Contrary to another poster's comment, I think most death really is sad, but since I didn't know Mr Backus personally, I prefer to reflect on what he contributed to society as a whole instead of displaying false grief.
Indeed it was.
They're talking points for use when marketing to a certain category of Linux user. In this case, ironically, I think Microsoft actually make quite a decent argument: in the business software world, a lot of the best stuff does only run on Windows today. You can argue whether this is down to Microsoft or the choices of the individual software vendors (except with things like Office, obviously) but that doesn't really matter if you're aiming at a group who are open-minded and simply looking for the best software for their business. Convincing someone who wanted to use Linux for ethical/philosophical reasons (another of their five categories) would be far harder, I should think.
You don't think those two statements are slightly contradictory? :-)
I'm a keen driver, and a strong advocate of road safety, so I've looked at a fair bit of the research that's available. Most variables that have been found to affect driver attitude are based on something that is happening while they're actually in the car: things like tiredness, drink and drugs obviously have an effect, but so do things like the type (actually, speed) of music you're listening to. (Some groups of drivers also generally exercise better judgement regardless of the immediate circumstances: to find out who, take a look at what counts for/against you when your insurance premium is worked out!)
Then again, perception of speed is also affected by recent experience: think how slow it feels when you come off a high speed road into a town, even if you're doing the limit around town, and compare that with how that limit feels when you're just starting driving and already in town. That's perception rather than attitude and judgement, though.
So while the conclusions here seem plausible, they're also a bit unusual. I saw a story very similar to this a few days ago in the UK media. Anyone know if these are all the same thing, or there's a recent research trend generating several sets of results in quick succession?
Because employees are human beings, with more important responsibilities that do not stop just because they are at work?
Because lots of essential services are only available during office hours?
Because people have breaks during the day, when they're not required to be working?
I'm not saying people should abuse the ability to make personal calls and spend all day chatting up their girlfriends/boyfriends/whatever, but sometimes you just need to communicate with other people during office hours, and other times a quick call to someone can make you feel much better. The smart employer respects this, and provides suitable facilities for personal calls to be made privately and without distracting others in the office. Your approach appears to be focussed on working 100% of the time during office hours, something which no human being can sustain productively anyway, at the expense of causing unnecessary inconvenience/concern to employees, which will actually decrease productivity.
Then we do indeed live in different worlds. In my world, the good people rarely have trouble finding a new job even in so-called employer's markets, while the costs to business both of losing good people and of recruiting new people are significant for even a single member of staff. In any case, this is beside the point, which is simply that treating employees respectfully as valued people gets far better results than a culture where every member of staff is just another human resource.
Don't knock it, we've finally found something a Herb Schildt book is good for. Given the very negative comments he often gets in book reviews, that's a welcome change!
I think you misunderstood. To make the links, you take about 5-6 inches of reel-to-reel tape, wrap it around to form a loop, and then seal it with a bit of sticky tape. Then you take the next piece of reel-to-reel, and loop it through the first before sealing it, thus forming the link. The prior art the GPP mentioned is found in every school for five-year-olds in the country, around 15 December every year, and has been since long before your new-fangled punch cards were invented! :-)
The after-publication stuff is due to exclusivity deals, yes. My point was that researchers are now very reluctant even to put up preprints. Publishers hear that something has been put on-line, and because of the archive sites, some won't consider publishing it at all, where before they might at worst ask the author to remove it from their own web site for a few months after the journal was published.
In other words, because sites like archive.org are redefining what publishing on a web site means in practice, people are now refusing to publish on their web sites at all. This is not a plus for either the authors or the public, nor even for archive.org since it will never get a copy of any of these papers either way. This is a textbook example of why we have copyright: by undermining it here, the author's incentive to distribute is diminished, and works are not being shared.
This is not some hypothetical argument, BTW. I live in Cambridge, UK and know many people who work at the university both personally and professionally, and this reluctance to put anything on personal web sites is becoming widespread as a direct result of caching and archiving, and their consequences for the author's ability to get published.
You make an interesting comment about the use being transformative; I've never seen it framed that way before. I'm not sure I personally buy it -- I'm not entirely convinced that the use there is different enough from the normal use of the data to be a genuinely new thing -- but it's certainly a fair argument to make.
I'd agree with the non-commercial factor. (A more interesting case there would be someone like Google, who makes money through the advertising on its various services, but offers them for no direct cost to the public. I would take this to be commercial, but perhaps a good lawyer could argue otherwise.)
I'm not sure about significant market impact. I can think of plenty of cases where sites deliberately put up material temporarily, but charge for access to their archives as a way of funding the new content, for example. Permitting archive.org to reproduce such material would undermine the existing business model. That would have a direct impact on the value of the company's existing archives. It could also be against the public interest, since it might drive the company to switch to (for example) a subscription model where no content was freely available without a paid-for account, thus reducing the amount of information freely available on the web.
It would certainly be an interesting court case if archive.org was ever challenged in isolation (without the attendant contractual shenanigans we seem to have in this case). Even then, though, it would be tough to read any precedents into the result either way. One of the nice things about US fair use law is that it pretty much requires each case to be considered on its own merits, but that does have a downside as far as clarifying the law for others goes.
Everyone is naive in some field. Are you an accountant, a lawyer, an electrical engineer, a road safety researcher, a trained negotiator, a computer expert, and a pilot? Probably not, but chances are that you rely on the expertise of people who are everyday. Luckily we have developed a society where people with different specialisms can interact, and share the benefits of what each can do.
In such a society, there will always be scope for a specialist to take advantage of a non-specialist. Thus we have developed things like consumer protection laws and business regulations. These laws aren't there to protect the stupid, they are there because no-one can know everything about everything.
So yes, I agree entirely that people should take a reasonable level of personal responsibility for their actions, and certainly far more than some nanny states have expected recently. I just prefer to keep this in perspective, and recognise that no-one is a universal expert, and therefore laws should be framed to support non-experts too.
And what about the next archive site, and the next one, and the other one you never even heard of? You can't have a principle of copyright that says that someone has the right to control the reproduction of their work, and then say that the copyright holder must opt-out or manually delete their own work from an arbitrary number of sites according to each site's own policies or they effectively relinquish their copyright. That position is inconsistent.
Now, you could argue about the relative merits of copyright vs. other approaches to compensating artists and encouraging distribution, and I'd be happy to discuss them with you. But right now, copyright is what we have, and the behaviour of sites like archive.org undermines it and unbalances the system. It's already harder to get academic papers on-line than it used to be, because researchers are reluctant to post copies on their own sites before publication for fear of never being published, and afterwards they're tied down by other legal restrictions from the publishers.
On the contrary. Copyright exists, according to one school of thought (which includes the US Constitution), precisely because it is necessary to incentivise artists enough that they will share their work. If sites like archive.org go around undermining that, and thus undermining the benefits that copyright provides, you get the sort of situation I described above where works never get put on the Internet in the first place. Then not only does archive.org not have it, but no-one else does either.
But my point is that, realistically, a lot of people will think they have a fair idea about the rules, but actually they don't, because right now there are services that are fundamentally operating outside the usual rules and getting away with it.
I've had similar discussions in the past about Usenet, where services like Deja/Google Groups developed archives over time. Geeks on Slashdot often reply that Usenet posts are not guaranteed to be deleted within any specific time frame, and that there are headers you can set to indicate that you don't want your post archived. That doesn't change the fact that most ISPs' Usenet servers, even today, will drop old posts after a few weeks, and it is therefore reasonable for someone who is not familiar with the higher geek voodoo to assume that this is how Usenet works and that anything they post will also be removed after a few days.
In this case, and talking specifically about the copyright issue without comment on the dubious contract stuff, I think it's more like a vegetarian making a dinner booking at a restaurant, getting to the restaurant, finding that only meat dishes are on the menu, and being told they can't cancel their booking and have to pay anyway because they didn't say "vegetariosa" when they made the call to reserve a table... in a town where it's a legal requirement for all restaurants to provide a vegetarian alternative. But then I think in analogies too much. :-)
Consider personal homepages. On these, there may be a lot of minor pieces of personal information subject to disclosure over time, even if the user removes older posts after a while. A user unaware of the behaviour of archival services and the conventions involving robots.txt may not take steps to prevent that information being recorded permanently. Hell, they may not even have control over robots.txt, if their home page is being run on a third-party system and not hand-crafted.
Another possibility is that a user of a third-party blogging service may not appreciate the significance of some of the options, and may consequently reveal information publicly that they thought only a limited audience could see, until they realise their mistake and change the settings.
In either case, any damage caused by disclosing the information is effectively permanent and searchable once the formerly public information has been archived, even though the user was unaware of the risks at the time they posted it and took steps to remove the information when they found out.
I didn't say that.
I didn't say that, either.
However, it is undeniable that these archival services are treading on thin legal ice at best. It is also undeniable that as a result of their legally dubious actions, further damage may be done, possibly much greater than the damage caused by the original error. Of course the original blame lies with the person who made the error in judgement, but that doesn't mean we should give anyone else who ever takes advantage of that error a free pass on any moral or legal consequences of their actions. Other areas of the law are not so naive, so why should this one be special?
Have you ever seen what happens to someone who's the victim of identity theft? When that happens, that someone's life gets turned upside down, often for several months. People lose money, jobs, even homes. Alarmist bullshit? Not if you've seen it happen to someone close to you and watched them pick up the pieces. And that has nothing to do with archives scanning pages at unfortunate times, and everything to do with storing enough old information that someone willing to spend a bit of time can piece together enough of someone else's life to impersonate them well enough to get a foot in the door.
As for robots.txt, I have already pointed out numerous times in this discussion that this is is not a legally sufficient argument. In this case, you also cite procedures for removing content, but if you actually read those procedures in detail, you'll find that entries such as the one for requests to remove personal data are far from clear about how they'll be handled. In any case, that is once again an unofficial standard rather than anything with the weight of law, and it is unreasonable to expect every copyright holder publishing on the web to familiarise themselves with an arbitrary number of unknown archival services' own standards for removing data they had no permission to keep in the first place.
Have you even tried to work this out for yourself?
In terms of how many people know about robots.txt, there are currently ~100,000,000 domain names registered worldwide, studies suggest that fewer than 50% of these have any sort of robots.txt in place, and there will be a lot of duplication where one person runs multiple domain names. Looking at these numbers, it seems unrealistic to make claims about what "billions of people on the internet" understand.
Nor does it take a genius to verify my claims about the vast majority of Internet users. You can come at this from several angles. Look up the countries where most Internet users are based, and the proportion of the population in those countries that those users represent. Since big hitters like the US have a heavy majority of their population on-line now, it would require a very significant proportion of the population of those countries to be geeks if my claim was untrue. Do you believe this to be the case?
If you do, consider that estimates put around 25% of PCs attached to the Internet in at least one botnet right now. That's a pretty clear indication that around 25% of people on the Internet aren't even smart enough to configure an anti-virus product properly. Are you seriously going to tell me that in this world, knowledge of robots.txt is commonplace?
Yes, it is, which is why inflammatory posts like both the GPP and yours have no place in it. The things you accuse me of doing are just like the things I picked up the GGP poster for. Your arguments are emotive, your logic is based on ad hominem attacks, and you are generally lowering the tone of the discussion. Now run along and read up on the subject, and post something constructive will you? I've got several other posts to reply to, all of which are more reasoned and interesting than yours.
Do you honestly not see the potential for harm caused by archiving everything that ever goes on the web? Here are a few possible examples, from the dramatic but rare to the much less dramatic but everyday:
I could give dozens more examples, but hopefully the point is made. Hell, there are even laws to protect the information in several of these cases, though in many places in the western world they concentrate on governments and businesses, and for bizarre reasons I've never understood, individual privacy is considered less important in law.
OK, I'm all for reasonable levels of personal responsibility, and I'm hardly a fan of the nanny state. However, no-one can ever protect themselves from everything all the time. The w
But accepted by whom? Consider how dangerous it would be to set a legal precedent saying that permission could be implicitly granted in such a wide-ranging way, simply by failing to use a convention that the vast majority of Internet users have never heard of.
I'm not contending anything about the contractual notice at all. I think that whole issue is daft. I'm merely commenting on the copyright issue, and in that respect, no notice is required, in either the US or Spain.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote there, but nor do I see the problem here. Putting a web page on-line might reasonably be interpreted as granting permission for someone to download and view it. Arguing that it grants permission for any third party service to replicate and republish the entire web site -- effectively renouncing the copyright entirely -- is stretching that rather a lot, though, is it not?
Actually, I'm well aware of robots.txt, and my own web sites use it to specify the site organisers' preferences. This isn't about me, it's about the millions of people publishing information on the Internet, using ISPs providing services they've paid for, who through no fault (and, often, with no control) of their own may be damaged if this sort of issue isn't dealt with, or is dealt with in a way that assumes everyone knows all the higher geek voodoo involved.
Agreed on both counts.
Of course it does. That is, after all, the point. But the nature of the reproduction is limited by the four criteria specified in the legislation. In general, it does not cover 100% reproduction of an original work in the same form and for the same purpose, which is what we're talking about here. I don't dispute either your example here or the Google example in your other post, but they are not the same as what we're talking about here.
No it doesn't, and nothing I've posted anywhere in this thread says I believe her contractual shenanigans are appropriate. I am simply contending that this does not affect any earlier infringement that archive.org may have committed.