Sun, 18 Mar 2007

Archive.org Sued By Colorado Woman

Bullshit! If she really didn't want her material archived, it would've taken less than 30 seconds to create a file that would've prevented it. This gal intentionally had no robots.txt file and instead posted her refusal to be spidered on her main page in HTML. Any Court that has a brain will see through this transparent attempt to collect $$$ from Google and other search engines - she just started off with the smallest of the lot to try and get some legal traction.

It won't work.

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.

(link) [Slashdot]

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