18 March 2007

Opt-in Search Engines?

Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts

... The Internet Archive, which spiders the Internet to copy Web sites for posterity (unless site owners opt out), is being sued by Colorado resident and Web site owner Suzanne Shell for conversion, civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act.
Can A Spider Enter Into A Binding Contract?--Internet Archive v. Shell
In Internet Archive v. Shell, No. 06-cv-01726-LTB-CBS (D.Col. 2/13/2007), the Colorado federal district court decided that more facts were needed and refused to dismiss the breach of contract claim for failure to state a cause of action. Whether or not the claim will survive a summary judgment motion remains to be seen.
Would this impact search engines that excerpt (derivative copying) in the same way? I guess it could depending on the site's restrictions.

UPDATE: Thanks to "billy" in comments, from profane-justice.org (pdf):
... This lawsuit isn't about spiders. It's not about searching, finding or indexing or linking. It's about copying, storing, displaying and distributing without permission. It won't hurt Google or any other of those valuable search engines out there who are NOT copying. We LIKE the search engines. We use them. We are on them. They are valuable....
IGeek? Sheesh.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Suzanne Shell has a degree in computer programming. She left out the robot.txt on purpose.also www.profane-justice.org owns a website http://badadvocates.com/ proving what kind of person she is..billy
http://thetruthistold.com