Also, what about Google? Ever click that little “Cashed” link? That suff usually only persists a couple weeks (depending on how frequently the googlebot checks the site) but it’s the same thing in principal.

Why stop with the “digital library” (aka wayback machine) lets just sue everyone.

What about everyone that had a packet sniffer running. Track them down and sue them too!

Oh, let us not forget anyone who viewed the site that had their browser set to cache.

Just a thought. If we’re going to be retarded, we should go all the way.

The reason this website is being sued, is because another company is being sued, because of data found by using Wayback Machine… which is perfectly fine! BUT since obviously the company doesn’t want to get sued because of the Wayback Machine, they are blaiming their problems on it…

Bottom line… you can’t sue or say its illegal for a website to save PUBLICLY viewable information… If I could see it from anywhere at one point in time, without paying for it, then its perfectly fine to save that info, in the name of history! The Wayback Machine is very helpful to a LOT of people, because it saves useful information that isn’t available anymore, because the owner of the original site either removed it, or couldn’t afford to keep it up…

THIS IS YET ANOTHER REASON THE DAMN DMCA SHOULD NOT BE A LAW! THIS KIND OF ABUSE IS EXACTLY WHY ITS SUCH A BAD THING!

As far as I can see, the Internet Archive is not actually required by remove pages, but they do it anyway in accordance with a number of guidelines they have chosen to adopt.

If anyone can find an actual “contract” that the Internet Archive has between delisted sites, please let me know – I can’t find anything that even looks like a contract.

The most relevant thing I can see on the IA site is in one of the FAQs:
“The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection. By placing a simple robots.txt file on your Web server, you can exclude your site from being crawled as well as exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine.”

This is hardly a contract and could easily be classed as a friendly piece of advice. It does say later that “Internet Archive uses the exclusion policy intended for use by both academic and non-academic digital repositories and archivists. See our exclusion policy.”

The relevant exclusion policy is based on the guidelines which are specific on what actions should be taken for particular types of removal requests (so a lot depends on what type of removal request was made by Healthcare Advocates). None of the archiver’s responses are guarenteed however.

Alex H

it’s simple. if you don’t want it in the public domain, don’t release it!
If you put it out for people to read and it comes back to bite you in the ass, then I guess you should never have released it in the first place.

This is nothing short of an attempt at censorship and you can look for more to follow. Again if the site didn’t have a past image of the old website, who can prove the old website held incriminating data? While the work-around of using robots.txt as the authorization for the claim is being used, how many actually see the file robots.txt? I don’t think the average web surfer will see it. Nor do I think they have much ground to stand on. Reason being that much of the stance of the RIAA has been it is entitled to obtain IP numbers by the supposition that you are in public, not private on the internet and that websurfers have no guarentee to privacy while they surf. Basically that hasn’t been questioned in court. By default as long as it is not questioned it remains a valid way to obtain info and not just ip numbers.

If you maintain a website it is up to you to control your security. If you surf the web, it is up to you to control your security also. If you don’t care about security, then don’t complain at every hacker and web crawler that comes across your data and uses it. Microsucks doesn’t promise security other than by lipservice. If you want that security you have to take extra steps that are not default settings or programs to do so. Unless robots.txt is a filter to prevent connections then they really have no case there. You don’t want someone in, you block their ip numbers or domain. Again, your security is your problem to deal with, not others.

Those thugging thieving b@$t@rd$ down at that den of iniquity, The Internet Archive. Man, those clean living honest lawyers need to really throw the book at them. I hear the Archive’s servers are actually located in hell…

You knew I was kidding, right?

Also I would think the copyright holders of the origional Rocky and Bullwinkle show’s would sue them for using the term “The Wayback Machine.”

Rick