File this under "lawsuits that don't make sense"

Thursday July 14, 2005

This via the New York Times. The Internet Archive, one of the most well-loved sites on the Web if for nothing else the ability to go back to the days of heartbreakingly bad web design (this could be debated), is being sued. Why? Because, well, uh, it did its job.

"The Internet Archive uses Web-crawling "bot" programs to make copies of publicly accessible sites on a periodic, automated basis. Those copies are then stored on the archive's servers for later recall using the Wayback Machine.
The archive's repository now has approximately one petabyte - roughly one million gigabytes - worth of historical Web site content, much of which would have been lost as Web site owners deleted, changed and otherwise updated their sites.
The suit contends, however, that representatives of Harding Earley should not have been able to view the old Healthcare Advocates Web pages - even though they now reside on the archive's servers - because the company, shortly after filing its suit against Health Advocate, had placed a text file on its own servers designed to tell the Wayback Machine to block public access to the historical versions of the site."

The article goes on to state that this text file, actually a robot.txt file, had "told" the Archives to block certain files, but after repeated requests by somebody in the company, had allowed access. And that's what they're throwing a hissy fit about.

"The robots.txt file is part of an entirely voluntary system", states Patry, an intellecual property lawyer. "No real contract exists between the nonprofit Internet Archive and any of the historical Web sites it preserves."
Mr. Patry also noted that despite Healthcare Advocates' desire to prevent people from seeing its old pages now, the archived pages were once posted openly by the company. He asserted that gathering them as part of fending off a lawsuit fell well within the bounds of fair use.
Whatever the circumstances behind the access, Mr. Patry said, the sole result "is that information that they had formerly made publicly available didn't stay hidden."

What do you think of this? Talk amongst yourselves.