March 18, 2007 at 15:46Wayback Machine at stake
A resident of Colorado Susan Shell sued to service the Wayback Machine (the Archive of Internet) , accusing him of "spiders" in violation of the laws.
Wayback Machine spider robots index sites and save copies of all “for posterity” pages. Using this service you can see how a particular site looked a month or a year ago; they also use it to find content already removed from a site.
In US law, there is the concept of “contract concluded as a result of the interaction of electronic agents”. Such a contract may be concluded even if the user is not notified about it.
The site, which is owned by Susan Shell, has a warning that if a visitor copies or distributes the content of the site, he should familiarize himself with the “contract” posted on a separate page. Thus, Susan accuses the Spiders of the Wayback Machine of violating this contract. However, she does not seem to care about the fact that the robots cannot be aware of the contents of the contract; in addition, the site does not have a robots.txt file.
Lawyers are currently pondering how correct and adequate the type of presentation of the “contract” that Susan Shell provided to search engines. If the court takes the side of the plaintiff, considering the lawsuit justified, then Internet companies seem to have to teach their robots to understand user agreements. Moreover, not only Wayback Machine automatically saves copies of pages on its servers ...
Wayback Machine spider robots index sites and save copies of all “for posterity” pages. Using this service you can see how a particular site looked a month or a year ago; they also use it to find content already removed from a site.
In US law, there is the concept of “contract concluded as a result of the interaction of electronic agents”. Such a contract may be concluded even if the user is not notified about it.
The site, which is owned by Susan Shell, has a warning that if a visitor copies or distributes the content of the site, he should familiarize himself with the “contract” posted on a separate page. Thus, Susan accuses the Spiders of the Wayback Machine of violating this contract. However, she does not seem to care about the fact that the robots cannot be aware of the contents of the contract; in addition, the site does not have a robots.txt file.
Lawyers are currently pondering how correct and adequate the type of presentation of the “contract” that Susan Shell provided to search engines. If the court takes the side of the plaintiff, considering the lawsuit justified, then Internet companies seem to have to teach their robots to understand user agreements. Moreover, not only Wayback Machine automatically saves copies of pages on its servers ...