The Internet Archive Sued Over Stored Pages 801
Kailash Nadh writes "The Internet archive, which has been storing snapshots of millions of webpages since 1996 has been sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, Philadelphia. The firm was defending Health Advocate, a company in suburban Philadelphia that helps patients resolve health care and insurance disputes, against a trademark action brought by a similarly named competitor. In preparing the case, representatives of Earley Follmer used the Wayback Machine to turn up old Web pages - some dating to 1999 - originally posted by the plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia. Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive, saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive's database, was unauthorized and illegal." CT:update note that the submittor got it backwards: Healthcare Advocates is the sueing Wayback and Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, not the other way around.
obvious man question (Score:5, Insightful)
Books vs. Internet material (Score:3, Insightful)
The law has the ugly job of sorting out what constitutes copyright infringement -- republishing a website, perhaps? With the internet, it has become infinitely easier to republish works in their en
Re:Books vs. Internet material (Score:3, Insightful)
Then those books sit there for 6 years, and someone (law firm) decides to (gasp) check out those books and use them as reference material in their suit against the people who originally published those books.
More like, you placed six copies in the library, the library made a duplicate of each copy, you took away the six copies (think
Analogies (Score:5, Insightful)
Every analogy is bad. We cannot equate electronic information with physical information of ages past. Every analogy just plain sucks.
The reason the information age has taken off is because of the ease of transmitting, storing and copying of electronic data. These methods weren't available fifty years ago, and weren't wide spread until about twenty years ago. Trying to stuff these concepts into one-hundred plus year old ways of thinking is just useless.
This does not mean we can't use older solutions to problems to guide us in the future. But, we need to stop shackling ourselves to old ways of thinking. The fundamental way we transmit thoughts and ideas have changed, our fundamental way of thinking about information needs to change as well.
Does this mean "all information is free"? No. But trying to treat electronic information like a book is useless. Web sites are put out to be publicly consumed. It is contradictory to say that someone cannot cache it for non-profit purposes. Trying to reuse the "creative" parts of the web site for commercial purposes should be prohibited.
Bottom line: Stop with the analogies. Start thinking fresh.
Re:Analogies (Score:3, Funny)
Using an analogy in an argument or explanation is like sneezing in the other person's face! Only slightly different in obvious ways. You get my point...
The problem (Score:3, Insightful)
In terms of public domain, visibility, and various other terms the analogies aren't bad. It's quite similar to patent cases... just because you do something on the internet doesn't make it unique (which makes for a lot of dumb patents), and really taking an electronic 'snapshot' of a publicly visible webpage shouldn't b
Re:Analogies (Score:5, Insightful)
But the problem with not using analogies is that our lawmakers, enforcement officers, and general populous doesn't get it. At all.
Something completely rediculous regarding information and electronic communication comes up from the legal system or whatever, and all of us that understand the technology go "What the fuck? How could they not get this?"
Well it's simple, they didn't understand the technology and so they used an "analogy" to find an equivalent parallel and then just treated the situation like whatever. But of course since they don't understand the technology, they pick a horrible analogy.
E.g. Downloading music is like shoplifting. (No it's not, it's not theft.) Hackers are like sophisticated evil genius supervillians. (No they're not, those kids just changed the URL so they could see their *own* admittance results.) DRM is like a lock on the producers warehouse. (No it's not, it's like a lock on every one of *my* CD's in my own house.)
When people don't understand somewhat abstract ideas and concepts, they make concrete analogies to try and get a general idea of it. If we try and stop making analogies and start "thinking fresh", the common people and our lawmakers just won't get it... and they'll continue to use their shitty analogies as guidelines that will turn into shitty laws. We don't get it perfect, but maybe as a collective eventually we can find something pretty accurate.
Short translation of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:obvious man question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:obvious man question (Score:3, Informative)
I was under the impression that libraries had permission to distribute the content that it does. In fact, in Canada, authors (Canadian ones at least) get given some money to cover their books that are in libraries. I'd say that pretty much means there's an agreement (and not an assumption of one because the author hasn't said no) between libraries and authors.
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? How about those Harry Potter books that were sold a few days ago? :)
Re:obvious man question (Score:3, Funny)
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting up an unprotected web site is akin to putting up a billboard. If I take a picture of the billboard and publish it in a textbook that kids read for the next 20 years, should I be expected to be sued by the billboard company? I'm really sick and tired of companies that have absolutely no clue how the Internet and the world wide web works putting up sites and then expecting you to never cache them anywhere. They have this old mentality that they control the flow of information and frankly, that's just not true anymore.
Re:obvious man question (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, you always copy webpage, even when you don't cache them, it is in memory (and/or pagefile/swap).
TV is not cached in a normal set, because it is transmissio based, HTTP is just copy a file, and s
Re:obvious man question (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that it's not someone giving you a free book. Like you said, you have access to copy it, so it's a little more like someone putting a free book on display in a public place right next to a xerox machine and encouraging people to xerox the thing and take it home to read.
And, in fact, that book will also be cached elsewhere, so it's as
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Interesting)
I can tell you exactly where the problem lies (and I know this because I have customers who behave this way):
When they write documents, they write them in HTML format. They send their email, they send itin HTML format. When I asked for them to prepare content for their website, they gave me a Microsoft Word document in HTML format, and said "You don't have to use the same fonts I used in this document, but please keep the layout the same on my website."
These users equate "a document" to "a website", and they think that once they stop using or sending that document out, that their "website" should be removed as well. They think websites are "sent" to people, not requested "by" people, and that when you close your browser, your "document" is gone.
That simply is not the case, and people need to be re-educated to understand these technologies and how they work. The Internet was MEANT to be self-healing, in case one node or another went down, information and information pathways would still be functioning.
Clueless Lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clueless Lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
However, knowing the people in Congress, such a "Corporation Control Act" would not serve to control corporations. Instead it would give ultimate control of the country to corporations.
It's all in how you read the title.
Re:Clueless Lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it doesn't matter what the original intent was, the end result would be as you describe. See regulatory capture [blogspot.com].
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly, the Internet Archive honours robots.txt, so if you don't want people to surf your archive, you can just post their robots.txt file and it will block everything, even into the past.
I would say that caching and archiving are so well understood to be part of the Internet that posting a web page and not expecting it to be archived or spidered is absurd. In other words, by posting their site to the web without a robots.txt, they knowingly published it in a medium which contains facilities for archiving and later redistribution.
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
So it appears that the basis of the lawsuit is that the robots.txt was NOT honored. The plaintiff claims that the robots.txt is a "contract" and that the wayback machine violated the contract by still allowing archived pages to be viewed in a limited number of attempts, for reasons unknown.
However, the TFA also does mention that honoring the robots.txt is strictly voluntary and does not constitute a contract.
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:5, Funny)
Shouldn't that be "...the f***ing TFA article also does mention..."
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:3, Insightful)
"unfortunately for your argument, the legal truth is that copyright protection is the DEFAULT, so robots.txt has it backwards. the fact of the matter is that to be (more) compatible with existing law, there should be an allowcache.txt, not a robots.txt."
I would agree, but I'm arguing that archiving and redistribution is part of the medium that the copyrighted work was published in. The webmaster of the site certainly knew that the site would be archived. They would also know that robots.txt is a volunt
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually there is a simple principle here.
The supreme court has ruled that directories cannot be copyrighted if the information they contain is purely factual in FEIST v. RURAL TELEPHONE, 1991
An example is the telephone book, those are all facts and that was what the case was about.
The wayback machine could be called a directory of old web pages, cached as they existed at the time. Facts.
Thus protected from copyright claims.
Well, there's their defense. It would be kind of fun to argue!
In any case it looks like the wayback machine needs a couple hundred mirrors. Heh.
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wayback Machine on the other hand stores copies of pages, not copies of their adresses.
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting material on the Internet does not give up your copyright on it, place it in the public domain, grant others the right to reproduce it any way they see fit, or otherwise work differently to copyright laws as they apply to all other media. There are necessarily certain implied rights, but arguing that actually ripping someone else's material and then making it publicly available after they've withdrawn it from their own site is a pretty big stretch to anyone without a vested interest.
Actually, while they do not give up any copyright, there are a number of explicitly stated, legal uses of copyrighted materials and there is a great deal of public benefit to enumerating a few more of them. Can you honestly argue it is not in the public's best interest that a historical archive of the internet exists, for educational reasons if no other? This case should be a poster child for just such legislation. A company published something, lied about it, and are now suing the people who made a copy and proved their guilt. Are you saying it is in the best interests of society that copyrights be used as tool to promote lies and censorship?
Copyright is supposed to be about one thing and one thing only, promoting science and arts. That is the only constitutional provision for its existence. If someone is copying legally obtained works into an archive for educational, historical, or non-profit uses then they are almost invariably helping to promote science and arts, and anyone trying to stop them is up to no good.
As to the letter of the law (which is probably unconstitutional although it is impossible to prove that) you're right. The internet archive is screwed in the U.S. and many other countries. They tried to do what copyright law originally required of copyright holders and the library of congress. If a work is to copyrighted then ethically it needs to be available. That is the whole point of copyright. According to the letter of the law it is probably illegal for me to print out the receipt some e-businesses display when I buy something online. The law needs to be fixed.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
What? How does this limiting of the rights of others encourage them to distribute the material? They, like the majority of copyright holders these days, don't want the work to be available at all. It does not encourage them to publish it, it just gives them a way to prevent works from being distributed.
The archive is in trouble not because the violated the intention of copyright. They, in fact, are trying to uphold the very principals upon which it is founded. Unfortunately, the laws have been changed by the corrupt and greedy to create a situation where copyright does exactly the opposite of its original purpose. This is a perfect example of copyright laws that have been rewritten being used to hold back progress and remove works from public availability. It is unethical and sickening and your implication that a businesses financial considerations should trump both the rights of our descendants to have access to our works and that they trump the the ability to find and present the truth in the courts... well it makes me want to vomit. Go to hell.
Re:We have this one every time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are just the first few examples that come to mind, but the significance is clear: just because some information was available somewhere at some time, that doesn't automatically means there's a benefit to society to preserving that information in an obvious place for all time.
The answer to problems with information like drafts and trade secrets being public knowledge after being published is simple, don't publish them. If you don't want people to read drafts of unfinished works, don't publish them online. You do realize copyright law, even today in theory, insures that all copyrighted works are to be preserved for the public and given over to the public for all time once it expires right? And how many better authors would we have today if we did have Shakespeare's drafts to look at to help understand his writing process?
I'm going to skip your constitutional arguments, because copyright is an international convention, and most of the world isn't subject to your constitution. Can we agree the more neutral definition that copyright exists to promote the creation and distribution of works for the benefit of society?
Most copyright law in the world is pretty similar to that in the U.S., but fine lets ignore the U.S. constitution. Lets talk about natural versus artificial rights. Freedom of speech is in my opinion a natural right. Copyright is, in my opinion an artificial right, granted as part of an agreement between authors and those who would benefit from said authorship. Authors are rewarded for giving works to the public with the rights to make money. What advantage does a copyrighted work that is not available to the public give to the people who are giving up their natural right to copy it freely?
Your position is illogical. We're talking about material that has already been made available. If it's a work of value, then probably it was removed because the copyright holder was going to distribute it via some other means, or was working on a newer, better version and didn't want the out-of-date material getting in the way. If it's not a work of value, then there is little public interest to be served in preserving it, particularly if doing so causes any harmful effects to the parties involved.
And here is where your argument falls apart completely. You're making a whole slew of assumptions here, most of which are not true. First you're putting responsibility for deciding what is and is not of value to the public into the ahnds of the copyright owner (note in most cases this is NOT the author anymore). Next you're assuming that not only will the copyright owners know what works are valuable to the public, but they will act in the best interests of the public rather than in their own best interests.
You do realize that the vast majority of copyrighted works including art, literature, film, and music are completely unavailable to the average person right? About .05% of all copyrighted books are still in print and maybe 3% are still available either new or used. The same holds true for music. This is mostly because so many works are copyrighted, but no one knows who holds that copyright, or because the large companies that own millions of copyrights don't want older works to compete with current offerings. Is it in the best interests of the public as a whole to have no access to the majority of our artistic, music, theatrical, and literary heritage? How many great works are in those collections, that will never be seen ever again because the last copy is lost and it was illegal for anyone to make more except some company who did not see the profit in it?
If you remove copyright...
I never said anything about removing copyright, only reforming it. For example it used to be that every copyrighted work in the U.S. had to have two good copies sent to the library of congress to be archived for reference and to preserve the work for future generations. Sound familiar? If that law was still in effect
Usenet parallels (Score:3, Informative)
As far as I know, there hasn't been any definitive court case anywhere on the basic concept of Usenet archives. They at least have some kind of defence, because you inevitably expect Usenet messages to propagate beyond your control, and you expect that services providing Usenet feeds will charge money to their customers in exchange for relaying the information. IMHO, for Usenet archives it's more a question of whet
Re:obvious man question (Score:3, Insightful)
Again, not really applicable. This would be a case of taking a photo of every page in a book so that the words are legible, and then distributing the photos grouped together (with one or two pages missing).
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems rather more likely that the plaintifs fucked up their robots.txt file entries and that is why they were spidered.
At the risk of receiving yet another deposition I was part of the conversations that led to robots.txt. It was never intended to be an access control mechanism or an effective content control mechanism within the meaning of the DMCA. The objective was simply to allow sites with automatically generated content to tell the robots that parts of their site are not suitable for spidering.
So now it looks like we are going to have revisit the business model for the way back machine and work out how to float a littigation fund.
Actually one way that it could be done is to sign and timestamp material on receipt and offer the signatures as a premium service.
Re:obvious man question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, either that or try to get absorbed by the Library of Congress or something...
Re:obvious man question (Score:5, Insightful)
Who has the right right to store store windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site just so that you continue to come to my site to get updated versions of things.
I do this routinely with my technical papers exactly because I know they will be updated. They're usually available for people to view and read and link to, but I ask people not to make copies elsewhere and technically that "request" is enforceable under copyright law.
Now it's true that fair use allows some things to be copied for certain reasons. And, curiously, I think the need to copy for a lawsuit might stand up. But copying the entire of everything everywhere in anticipation of something being needed for a lawsuit sounds to me to be a questionable thing. To stretch the analogy one further: making a complete repository of photos of all store windows, almost as a workaround for the fact that those store windows were not directly accessible for use. That doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the fair use criteria is about the totality of the work, and while it's undefined how that comes into play in each instance, it's clear that the amount of bulk matters here.
Personally, I was initially uncomfortable with the Internet Archive, and I continue to be of mixed feelings about it. I think it serves a huge historical interest. However, in the nearterm it has some ill effects that run counter to the copying/distribution/presentation laws of copyright and may need some correction.
I might think it reasonable if
The disturbing part is that legal term of copyright seems to continue to lengthen with time. I'm a big fan of copyright as a form of personal control for authors to get income from their works, but copyright must lapse after some part and it is already well exceeding what I think is reasonable in that regard, with the trend looking to extend indefinitely as rich copyright holders influence congress to extend every time, say, Mickey Mouse comes into jeopardy.
Re:Who has the right right to store store windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:obvious man question (now, in a 2nd Ed.) (Score:5, Insightful)
If that's true, we had all better be careful not to visit *too* many pages on a given website during a given day. Either that or make sure that our web browser is set to immediately flush all downloaded content once it has been rendered.
The argument being made is that copyright is being violated, but the way the archive works might well be considered fair use, since the *only* reason it exists is for archival purposes. If having a copy of website content is illegal, in and of itself, then everyone who uses a web browser (unless they're running knoppix or something that doesn't store anything to the HD) is just as guilty as the Internet Archive.
I hereby rescind your permission to copy any of my posts, which means that if you're reading this, you're in violation of copyright law.
Okay, I now release my copyrighted work officially into the public domain. You're safe now.
Robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Legal precedents ?. (Score:3, Insightful)
It should be treated the same way trespassing for unfenced property is treated.
The case should be dismissed as it reproduces verbatim with attribution content that was published for public bot scraping.
Now what, will someone sue Yahoo ! or Google for caching pages or converting PDFs to HTML ? Or Coral Cache for unauthorized reproduction of websites ?.Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Think before you publish etc.
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
The copyright holder is the only one who can give such permission, for example via a copyleft license (GPL, CC, etc.).
Oops! (Score:5, Informative)
However, if you RTFA'd, you'd know that lots of IP law firms use the Wayback Machine on a daily basis, and in fact, the company suing the Internet Archive is not suing them for republishing copyrighted information. Rather, the case is that they recently placed a robots.txt file on their site that disallows viewing historical versions of the website, and the Archive is being sued because the Wayback Machine apparently ignored the robots.txt file (which, I might note is a voluntary standard, and by no means implies a contract between the two parties), which the plaintiff claims violates the DMCA. This has nothing to do with copyright violation.
It has everything to do with robots.txt. Read.
Re:Oops! (Score:5, Informative)
Ahem. Perhaps, if YOU had RTFA'd, you would have seen this little gem:
From TFA:
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Philadelphia, seeks unspecified damages for copyright infringement and violations of two federal laws: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (emphasis mine)
I'd also like to point out that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is about preventing copyright infringement.
Read.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Informative)
Adherence to robots is voluntary, done in good faith by crawlers for the general well being of the web.
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure if it was the reporter or Healthcare Advocates - but someone has absolutely no idea how robots.txt, web crawlers, web servers and the Internet Archive work.
They're implying that when the lawyers queried the old versions, that somehow the wayback machine really grabbed the copies old copies straight from Healthcare Advocates' website.
Perhaps they don't understand that "Wayback Machine" is just a name.
It's not actually a time machine.
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are more differences between books and webpages then the fact that the first are usually made of sheets of paper and the second are not.
Wanting the advantages of the WWW while retaining the control that paper publications give you is like wanting to eat your cake and have it.
There is this thing called 'reasonable expectation'. In the case of the WWW the reasonable expectation to have is that publishing s
Re:Please RTFA (Score:3, Interesting)
1) That the Wayback Machine came and archived their site sometime in 1999.
2) Since then they have added a robots.txt file
3) Because they now have a robots.txt file previously archived material should no longer be available
If so that's complete nonsense.
Cached (Score:5, Funny)
Other archives (Score:3, Insightful)
Lookng forward (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lookng forward (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lookng forward (Score:3, Interesting)
You make it sound as if the internet archive archived pages that required authorization. All pages they authorized were available to the public at that point in time, therefore no contract is required. IANAL so correct me if I'm wrong, obviously their lawyers would say that I am, but I think this lawsuit is frivilous.
Re:Lookng forward (Score:5, Insightful)
But NOT to redistribute it.
Re:Lookng forward (Score:3, Insightful)
>writing something better as soon as you wake
>up), but the point remains that there's a
>fundamental difference between redistributing
>and archiving.
But they DO redsitribute it, you can search their archieve and access it and its content. That is not archieving.
Re:Lookng forward (Score:3, Insightful)
You can. Just don't distribute it without permission. Don't like it? Tough. That's the law.
Or maybe if I watch public broadcast television and then write a transcript on my blog, is that a violation?
Actually, one person I know has been forced to take down their website because it hosted transcripts of a tv show. Summaries are covered by fair use. IA isn't a summary by the way.
If I give away a trillion copys of my book, can I sue the guy who
Outdated, I'm glad we're challenging it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not exactly the kind of people you want to be defending. The fact that copyright law can be used this way suggests it is broken. The fact that it was created before our modern information economy was formed also suggests it is broken and in need of revision.
Credibility is not something you can easily steal, and the people who "get there first" tend to get the lion's share of credibility, even when competing against companies much larger than themselves.So your cheap shot about how people on Slashdot have nothing to lose is just that, a cheap shot with no substance or truth. We're not saying that copyright laws need to be entirely abolished, but they do need to be updated to reflect our modern society and information infrastructure. The fact that we're compelled to lay unenforceable law after unenforceable law down on top of copyright law in a vain attempt to keep it afloat in its current state should be evidence enough that things need to change.
Excuse me? What? A public website is by its very nature meant to be redistributed. It is replicated on millions of machines per day for many different purposes. If you do not agree to at least some redistribution for your website, then take it offline because it doesn't work without redistribution.Sue the caching proxy servers! Sue people who use internet cache! Sue Proximitron users! Sue link-of-the-day sites because they helped people replicate the data. Wait, why not just sue everyone online, because they were party to the crime by using the same routers!
Nice, avoiding his point entirely. Part of copyright law is the intent with which you distribute it. This helps prevent entrapment scenarios. If you place a public site on the internet, your intent is to have it treated like a public site. This means it will be crawled by search engines, cached by proxies, linked to by interested users, downloaded for personal offline browsing, pre-cached by Earthlink and AOL services, and archived by the wayback machine.This is the cost of doing business on the internet. This is how it works, and how it's going to continue to work. If you are not willing to express this intent with your website, take it down now.
Bear in mind that the article is about a large insurance corporation trying to deny benefits to a group of people, using copyright law as a club to beat evidence into inadmissibility. We're not talking about chinese knockoffs ruining a poor independent artist. We're talking about Yet Another Way Out for corporate America's scumbags.If copyright law allows this, then we need to tear it down and fix it, because I'm not willing to pay such a stiff price for a basic kind of protection that I probably can't afford to fight in court anyways.
Instead of sueing them.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Instead of sueing them.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Library (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldnt this reference site be covered under some of the same protections as a library. It serves some of the very same purposes.
Hopefully this falls flat.
I wonder where the server are locations
Pablo
Lawsuits these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
They publish the thing, person X stores it, person Y uses stored info to prove they publish it. So what? If they'd written the thing in a newspaper they would sue someone for keeping the newspaper?
Huh
Did you even read the article you linked? (Score:4, Informative)
From the article:
Frivolous Lawsuit? Hardly [atla.org].
Excellent Spin-doctoring on McDonald's Part? Absolutely.
Let's compare this to other media (Score:3, Insightful)
God damnit (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not saying that legally they don't have a legitimate case, but is it really necessary to persue an organisation such as the Internet Archive over something so passive as this? In my opinion, hell no it isn't.
Re:God damnit (Score:4, Interesting)
But the internet is changing that, and now an errant picture or snippet of text can be reproduced and distributed widely for practically zero dollars.
I think eventually we'll settle on some kind of bubble of privacy concept, in which anything inside is legally protected, but anything you distribute outside that bubble is fair game for anyone, forever.
This is generally the case in the real world. If someone wears clothes, they effectively have created a privacy bubble, only allowing limited information about themselves to be distributed (via reflected light) to be seen by others. But what information they do allow to escape is fair game for distribution in photographs.
In a sci- fi series (Neverness et al), Zindell argues that in the future, even identity will be as carefully concealed in public as one's privates. As information technology saturates our culture, even revealing our identity in public is going to be increasingly dangerous.
Of course DRM advocates will try to attach little bubbles of limited privacy to specific bits of content released into the wild. Eventually, I hope, common sense will prevail and such ridiculous notions will be abandoned.
Re:God damnit (Score:4, Interesting)
The courts have held that things not plainly visible ( plainly being not obvios to a human at a reasonale distance or public place ) are illegal to disiminate. Like when you turn on night vision during the day. It captures IR and translates it to B&W, the problem is that our body reflects more of it than our clothes do giving all clothes a semi-transparent look. The courts have held that even though they were recourding in public they violated the privacy of the people taped. This doesn;t mean that all IR captures in public are illegal, but when it's specifically used to reveal information about a person that is not plainly visible it might be a crime.
The courts have also held that augmention of senses cannot be used as an excuse to break the 4th ammendmant. Cops can only use items that are plainy visible to initate a search on a private residence. This president was set after they used heat signatures to get warrants for pot growers ( because of the grow lamps used ). Remeber that with technology today you can basicly see movement and hear speech through walls.
summary is incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
The archive is being sued by Health Advocates, not the legal firm that had defended Health Advocates. In fact, the legal firm is named in the suit as well.
And to clarify: its not a simple "you have our stuff stored on your systems" claim. Rather, Health Advocates is claiming that the archive failed to follow the instructions in robots.txt that were intended to prevent access to historical material.
Re:summary is incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you were trying to be informative, but in this case it makes a big difference as to which company is doing the lawsuit. Its the plaintiff, not the defendant.
What? They have evidence? Sue them! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be candid, I'm surprised it took this long for someone to sue them.
Information Extracted (Score:5, Informative)
For the "I don't wanna rtfa because its early" crowd.
Re:Information Extracted (Score:5, Informative)
In so doing, the suit claims, the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumventing of "technological measures" designed to protect copyrighted materials. The suit further contends that among other violations, the firm violated copyright by gathering, storing and transmitting the archived pages as part of the earlier trademark litigation.
and
Even if they had, it is unclear that any laws would have been broken.
"First of all, robots.txt is a voluntary mechanism," said Martijn Koster, a Dutch software engineer and the author of a comprehensive tutorial on the robots.txt convention (robotstxt.org). "It is designed to let Web site owners communicate their wishes to cooperating robots. Robots can ignore robots.txt."
William F. Patry, an intellectual property lawyer with Thelen Reid & Priest in New York and a former Congressional copyright counsel, said that violations of the copyright act and other statutes would be extremely hard to prove in this case.
Re:Information Extracted (Score:4, Interesting)
How did Healthcare Advocates determin that Haridng Early was making hundreds of requests for files on the Wayback Machine? The logs would have been kept on the Wayback Machine's servers, not on anything Healthcare Advocates would have access to easily. Harding Earley would be accessing the files via the Wayback Machine's copies, not the copies that are kept on Healthcare Advocates website
RTFA Addendum (Score:5, Funny)
So the robots.txt was added YEARS AFTER the site had been archived. I don't think they correctly used the "no-archive-time-travel" directive.
This case should last all of 30 seconds. (Score:4, Insightful)
"You published information on a public medium. Case mismissed."
But then again this is America we're talking about.. home of the idiot lawsuit and lunatic judicial decisions so I don't hold out much hope for the triumph of reason...
I've got one word to say in response to this... (Score:3, Interesting)
the bottom line (Score:5, Insightful)
Just waiting for the big suit... (Score:3, Interesting)
Turn on the shredder! (Score:5, Insightful)
In effect, they're saying "we were wrong, we tried to destroy the evidence of our wrongdoing, but because the shredder jammed and you found the evidence anyway, you're abusing our copyright".
The court hearing their argument should thoroughly smack them. Perhaps they should be brought to justice for trying to destroy evidence (or instructing a third party to do so), surely that's illegal in these post-Enron days.
The obvious explanations are just too many to list (Score:3, Informative)
Who wins in a criminal vs criminal case? Would police officers be forced to fall on their own swords - ie commit criminal acts to gain evidence - on order of those above them? It also gives the thumbs up signal to vigilante justice too.
Oh, let's not also forget that it'd put the idea of court orders, seartch warrants, the right to be innocence until proven guilty (admittedly already fadi
Punish the offender (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of legal evidence gathering is ensuring you have a trail to prove it is valid.
Secondly what rights are trampled in the cause of getting that evidence?
By making illegally obtained evidence invalid you encourage proper behaviour. If the legal evidence is used to convict a killer the polic will get off with a slap on the wrists despite any crimes they may have committed.
If illegally o
Illegal searches and the Fourth Amendment (Score:3, Insightful)
I respectfully disagree.
The wrongs that would ensue if illegally obtained evidence is allowed to be used are the same as the wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence.
If by "the wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence" you mean the results of a crime (say, the wrong created by a handgun fired at the cashier of a liquor store during the course of an armed robbery, resulting in the cashier's death); then I would argue that t
Healthcare Advocates E-Mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Be gentle, they might be in the right after all.
The Archive faces a lot of potential problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, 2600 Magazine's old web site containing a copy of the DeCSS source code is stored in the Archive. Could the Archive be held in violation of the DMCA for mirroring someone else's old site?
If there is hope, it lies with the proles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me but... (Score:4, Insightful)
First and foremost, the existance of a robots.txt does not constitute a contract between the client (a web surfer/browser agent) and the server (the site hosting the content proper). Repeat that over and over. There is nothing stating that the existance of robots.txt on your server must be requested by my crawler or spider.
Its preferred, but not required. Even so, I am free to ignore it if I want, and parse whatever links I see fit to grab. If you make the content public and I want to read that content, I'm going to get it, whether you have robots.txt in place or not.
Secondly, has anyone taken the time to validate the robots.txt [searchengineworld.com] file found on the site in question [healthcareadvocates.com]? Note too that they just changed robots.txt on July 8th of this year. Did the previous version validate? Are they trying to rewrite history again? What did the old version look like?
If there is even so much as one error, robots/crawlers are free to ignore/parse/merge/break it as they see fit. It happens all the time, and even when robots.txt is perfectly valid, many robots and crawlers ignore it anyway (msnbot and Yahoo's crawlers are two of the worst offenders here).
But back to the first point, robots.txt is a guideline, not a rule, not a contract, and certainly not something that can be enforced. Does lack of a robots.txt file constitute the legal right to publically redistribute the content? Or store it for later review and retrieval? How do you know any of your former employees from 1996 haven't stored your entire website on floppy, one page at a time? Did they adhere to robots.txt? Did ANYONE adhere to robots.txt in 1996? It seems that there was evaluation of the Robots Exclusion Standard [robotstxt.org] in 1996, but was everyone using it? Not likely.
Microsoft Internet Explorer will certainly store the entire website for "reading offline" if you ask it to do so when bookmarking it. They don't parse robots.txt to exclude pages that shouldn't be stored locally.
Its too bad that people need to try to erase history to prevail in litigation. This isn't George Orwell's 1984... well, at least not yet anyway.
Robots.txt to become legally binding? (Score:3, Interesting)
In so doing, the suit claims, the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumventing of "technological measures" designed to protect copyrighted materials. The suit further contends that among other violations, the firm violated copyright by gathering, storing and transmitting the archived pages as part of the earlier trademark litigation.
Wow that is stretching things!! Ive never read the DMCA but to claim that a robots.txt file (which isnt a legally binding mechanism by any means) added to the site after the pages had been indexed had been ignored by the wayback machine was a circumvention of their copyright and a violation of that act...well Id fully expect any judge to have a good laugh at this.
HOWEVER given how poor the US legal system is I wouldnt be suprised to hear that robots.txt gains legal status as a binding document for crawlers!!
For some reason all that comes to mind (Score:4, Insightful)
Sue this (Score:3, Funny)
Sue a witness? (Score:5, Informative)
The write up is indeed, bollocks! (Score:5, Informative)
"The Internet archive, which has been storing snapshots of millions of webpages since 1996 has been sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, Philadelphia."
and also:
"Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive".
So to believe the write up, they are being sued by BOTH parties.
However, it says, in TFA:
"... John Earley, a member of the firm being sued, said he was not surprised by the action, because Healthcare Advocates had tried to amend similar charges to its original suit against Health Advocate, but the judge denied the motion. Mr. Earley called the action baseless, adding: "It's a rather strange one, too, because Wayback is used every day in trademark law. It's a common tool."
Christ knows where the idea they they are being sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey came from.
Doesn't anyone else read the stories first? o_O
Re:A significant change (Score:3, Interesting)
So what they've done (quite successfully) is make everyone think that all people do in the US is sue each other to death, but fact is that most of these lawsuits like this you hear about never go anywhere, and just
Re:If you put something on the web..... (Score:4, Informative)
You don't HAVE to register the copyright with the Copyright Office in order to retain the copyright. Doing so though gains you added benifits in case there is a dispute. Published works ARE REQUIRED to be registered. However, just putting the website up does not count as publishing. In order to be considered published works, the work must be sold or otherwise have a transfer of ownership, or through rental, lease, or lending. They Copyright Office has even said "The reports also state that it is clear that any form of dissemination in which the material object does not change hands, for example, performances or displays on television, is not a publication no matter how many people are exposed to the work." (Source [copyright.gov])
Re:The library clause (Score:3, Informative)