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Archive.org Sued By Colorado Woman
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Mar 17, 2007 11:12 AM
from the legally-binding-http-requests dept.
from the legally-binding-http-requests dept.
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."
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By reading this post... (Score:3, Funny)
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Suzanne Shell - Think of The Children!!!11!1 (Score:4, Informative)
She is advertised by: http://www.profane-justice.org/ [profane-justice.org]
An example of her work: http://www.profane-justice.org/sctcomplnt.pdf [profane-justice.org]
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!
Parent
SITE SLASHDOTTED (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Disclaimer: IANAL / Use it against them. (Score:5, Funny)
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
Parent
It's OK (Score:5, Informative)
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
Parent
Re:This is so stupid (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Posted notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Informative)
No, she didn't post the notice properly:
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.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.phillipsnizer.com/library/cases/lib_ca
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Informative)
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) [coloradoconfidential.com] 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!She needs a good spanking.
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Why not change the crawlers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Parent
Re:Why not change the crawlers (Score:5, Insightful)
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
That wouldn't be too hard either would it?
all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcaf2ThG7q4 [youtube.com]
UFO seen in skies over Winton!
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Interesting)
This notice is posted (where else?) on her web site...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
.Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [64.233.167.104], 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....
Parent
Re:Posted notice? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
If she didn't want it crawled.. (Score:4, Informative)
robots.txt (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Funny)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Maybe I'm new here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!"
Parent
The site in question? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A more relevant link (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The site in question? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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]"
Parent
Re:The site in question? (Score:4, Funny)
No, they don't.
Parent
A bit about Suzanne Shell (Score:5, Informative)
Much more about Suzannne Shell (fun to read!) (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
And look how effective she is! Heck, this belongs on Fark not Slashdot.
Parent
Suzannne Shell damaging but real problems exist (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Parent
World is bigger than the US... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Statute of Frauds (Score:4, Informative)
Court dismissed most charges (Score:5, Informative)
Check out this article here: http://www.phillipsnizer.com/library/cases/lib_ca
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?
Big deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if she has an answering machine. (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Anyone notice.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
mitigating circumstances: she's pro-child abuse (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Informative)