How Dare The Internet Archive Make Info Available!

from the they-might-use-it,-after-all... dept

Wed, Apr 12th 2006 5:13pm — Mike Masnick

The Associated Press is running a somewhat odd article concerning the lawsuit against the Internet Archive. What's odd is that (1) it's not clear why it's suddenly getting attention, since the case is simply ongoing and was announced a year ago and (2) the article seems to leave out most of the important details of the case. The specific case revolves around a law firm that did some research for a case using the Internet Archive to see what a site had said in the past. The company on the other side of that lawsuit wasn't particularly happy about it, and claimed that they had put up a robots.txt file that blocked the Internet Archive. Thus, they sued, claiming that the Internet Archive did not abide by the robots.txt. Of course, that's not explained in the AP article. Instead, the article seems to focus on the fact that the Internet Archive is some sort of dangerous offering, quoting the lawyer in the case noting that the site "is just like a big vacuum cleaner, sucking up information and making it available" as if that's a bad thing. There are certainly some questions concerning copyright that go along with the Internet Archive, but this article barely gets into the actual issues other than to quote a CS professor who claims: "the Internet Archive is 'the biggest copyright infringement in the world,' but... done in a way 'that almost nobody cares about.'"

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12 Comments

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Reese, 12 Apr 2006 @ 5:42pm

woot
first post
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wha?, 12 Apr 2006 @ 6:09pm

Information Bad?
If the information had not been in an Archive then someone would have sued for it not being there...

Information is the basis of a just society. Without proper information we would start wars over suspicions and fear.
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Mont, 12 Apr 2006 @ 7:10pm

Burned from the past.
It will be fun to see employers doing extensive web searches on prospective hires when the myspace.com generation goes looking for a job.
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discojohnson, 12 Apr 2006 @ 7:11pm

coverup anybody?
if the company in question was trying to hide the information, that should already be putting up red flags. there's no law that says robots.txt must be followed. hell, it could have been malformed to begin with!
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Myspace.com generation member, 12 Apr 2006 @ 7:39pm

"It will be fun to see employers doing extensive web searches on prospective hires when the myspace.com generation goes looking for a job."

Yeah, I hope so. All these friggin retards go posting all of their worst moments on the internet. The good news for me is that it will just make it easier for me to get a job, and these tards can be streetsweepers or something. Good riddance.
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bombice, 12 Apr 2006 @ 7:46pm

Re: Information Bad?
you hit the nail on the head with that one. Couldn't have said it better myself.
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facebook.com generation member, 12 Apr 2006 @ 7:47pm

who cares
of course. The more information available to everyone, the better. Makes for a more honest, simpler world.

Facebook > Myspace.

In 20 years, everyone will be in the same situation with their old facebook/myspace profiles...I don't see it being a huge problem.
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Robert Martin, 12 Apr 2006 @ 9:01pm

Re: Information Bad?
Without proper information we would start wars over suspicions and fear?

thank god that never happens!
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Annomy, 12 Apr 2006 @ 11:17pm

Re: Information Bad?
Starting wars over suspisions and fear.....hmmm.......sounds familar......kinda like something going on now.....if only i could remember it........
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Davjohn, 12 Apr 2006 @ 11:57pm

Information Bad?
The problem I see is that those who use the internet, as with anything else, enjoy the right to free speach. The one thing that most people forget is that rights carry responsibilities. In this case, what is free to say carries what is required to keep private. Publishing SSNs, bank account #s, wages, taxes witheld, etc is private. In this case then I would have to say that there is bad information. Just look at how the media hounds people and "anything to get that wannabe winning article or photograph" without regard to who gets hurt is not only bad information, but is what I call abdication of professional responsibility. Sometimes information is secret, and sometimes it is just responsibly private.
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Professor Highbrow, 13 Apr 2006 @ 1:13am

Re: Information Bad?
Starting wars over suspisions and fear.....hmmm.......sounds familar......kinda like something going on now.....if only i could remember it........

Nice... Too bad we can't look it up somewhere, eh? maybe somewhere such as an archive of information?

If the internet archive is a "GIANT VACUUM CLEANER" of information, I suppose libraries full of books are "GIANT VACUUM CLEANERS" of information as well. Yeah, I wrote that book, but you can't use what I wrote because The Giant Vaccum Cleaner local Library has a copy "archived?"

Sound like a book burner arguement to me...
It's hard enough to prove "who said what" but if you wrote it down somewhere, and put your name on it, you can't take it back. Why isn't this just tossed out of court?

I lost my library card, it was confiscated and I lost my privaledges for writing a short book entitled, "10 Reasons why I don't like the Government." The library has a copy, and I have the original, but I can't read the copy...

We need a -- way, somehow, to find out what these peole are saying... on the phone. And peopel are typing things on this web thingie too, so we need to see what they are saying if we need to, because it's common sense that terrorists send email to each other from their AOL accounts, and have MySpace profiles and personal "blogs."

Nice comment, Annomy.
I agree, information is very very bad. Imagine if people were able to talk to each other without us knowing? It would be mayhem, people exchanging ideas and such. They might even figure out that we're listening in!! Next thing ya know, people are gonna start demanding fair trials and all that nonsense!

--Professor HighBrow
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Apr 2006 @ 11:45am

wikipedia definition of robots.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt is the wikipedia definition of robots.txt - in relation to this article, note the third paragraph

"The protocol is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of your site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Many web site administrators have been caught trying to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world. However, the file is necessarily publicly available and is easily checked by anyone with a web browser."

you hear that? PURELY ADVISORY to the search spiders, as in they DONT HAVE TO FOLLOW ROBOTS.TXT!
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