Missing Link

I read an article on slashdot over the weekend (can you see a trend here, I read slashdot a lot, it’s interesting) that talks about a Colorado woman who is suing archive.org for spidering her website. She’s sueing Archive.org for civil theft, breach of contract and a few other charges. The Judge in the case dismissed all but the breach of contract charge. This seems pretty stupid, given that the “contract” she is suing for breach of was never expressly communicated to the organization spidering her content. Further, to view her site you have to click that you agree to the terms of the contract before you even have any option of VIEWING the contract. I’m pretty sure that’s not legally binding (though any lawyers who may end up reading this, your comments are welcome).

Before I go much further, let me explain what Archive.org is for those of you who are unaware. Archive.org is a (IMO Great) website that periodically crawls websites and archives them. You can go there and look through their “Way back machine” to see what your site looked like at various times it was crawled over the years. This is great, to be honest, as an interested party can very easily see the evolution of a website. For instance, they started archiving my site in 2004 with this version. You can click here to see a listing of all of the cached versions of my site. Now, while this process IS automated, and generally is done without your knowledge or prior express consent, there ARE technologies that are out there to prevent this for those who don’t want it to happen. Let’s talk about those now.

In general, there are two ways to prevent archive.org from spidering your website. Ask them to exclude your site or post a robots.txt file that has the commands to tell the robot not to spider your site (which actually allows you to do the same to googlebot, msn crawler, and yahoo’s crawler too). With a 2 second search on their site, it was very easy to find detailed instructions POSTED on archive.org’s site on how to prevent being archived. Those are available here.

So, given this knowledge, it would appear as though the woman either a.) does not know a damn thing about the Internet and web domains (and spider management) or b.) is out to extort people by not using all of the technologies available to her to prevent the actions she is seeking reparations for. As you can see by the screenshot (click it to see a larger version so you can actually READ it) she’s asking for $5000 per printed PAGE of her site, which is just plain ridiculous. I’m sorry lady, but I’ve seen your site and the layout is atrocious – and I have a hard time believing your content to be worth $5000 per PAGE. Moreover, I find your tactics to be rather juvenile. If you don’t want people to spider your site, use the technologies available to you to prevent it. Posting a notice (that has typos!) saying they are entering into a contract by copying the content is stupid – spiders have no way of knowing or understanding contracts, nor was there any adequate notification of the terms existence (or, for that matter, a chance to review said terms).

People like this really annoy me – it’s just plain silly when people sue for shit like this.

And in case anyone cares to note, it’s entirely possible that she will attack me for my site, since I have a picture of her “contract” terms on here. No, I did not pay $5000 to take the screenshot, nor do I particularly feel compelled to.

[tags] lawsuit,  stupidity on the internet,  invalid contract [/tags]