There’s always someone out there trying to make an easy buck by twisting U.S. law to “steal” from someone else’s earnings. Here’s a case that pisses me off. Internetarchive.org is being sued by Suzanna Shell (I’m not going to give them any traffic by linking to her site so just do a Google search for her name and it’s the first one that pops up: Profane Justice) spidering and indexing (archiving) her site. You might think, “Dammit, not another search engine being sued for doing something that violates copyright law.” Well, not really. This one is a little different. That’s why the media is eating this one up.
If you’re a web designer/webmaster in any way, shape, form, or fashion then you should already know that external links linking to your site is naturally a good thing. You want search engines to scour your site, index it, cache it, and finally offer it in it’s results to their users. Search engines have always leaned on the Fair use doctrine in U.S. Copyright Law to index public sites on the internet. There is even a way to opt out if you wish. It’s a simple process that involves adding a robots.txt file to the root directory of your site. Here’s an example of mine. As you can see I allow anything and everything to index and cache whatever they want. All legit or main stream search engine spiders follow the rules written to a site’s robots.txt file. If you don’t want a certain page or the whole site indexed then it’s easily changed by updating that file. Seems simple right?
Well, in this case Suzanna Shell is suing (actually has already sued) the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for conversion, civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act (COCCA). Seems legit at the moment IF Internet Archive actually did any of the above and IF Internet Archive didn’t remove her site upon request. December 2005 Suzanna sent a request to Internet Archive to remove her site and they complied. Right after that she went back and filed the lawsuit with the above complaints. She sued for $100,000 for unauthorized copying of her site. Upon reading this here I immediately googled her site and searched for the robots.txt file. Guess what I found? … nada. Over a year later (and I’m pretty sure she has been sent an email telling her of her faults) she still doesn’t have the simple text file posted. So either she’s an idiot who doesn’t understand yet or she’s playing the ignorant game and hoping she can use the law to cash in with a quick hundred thousand at least.
If you’ve visited her site you’ll first notice that it should be in the top 40 ugliest sites list. A 5 year old could have drafted a better site in Notepad than she in Dreamweaver. Okay, off of her atrocious site design. That’s too obvious. Let me point a few things out. This one for instance which is under the “Problems” page:
If you are having problems viewing this web site - it may be because we were forced to disable the copy, save and print functions on these web site pages. We had to do this because our adversaries (like CPS and hostile GALs) would copy and/or print these pages to submit to the courts for use against parents in their dependency cases. This is a blatant violation of state and Federal constitutionally protected rights (freedom of association, freedom to acquire useful knowledge, freedom of the press, right to petition the government for redress of grievances, etc.) of the parents and the children as well as copyright infringement against the owner of the web site. This conduct only reinforces our assertion that the child savers will lie, cheat and steal in their effort to protect children who don’t need protecting.
Forced to disable copy, save, and printing functions? Heh… Let me be the 1st to tell you that there isn’t any true way to disable copy, save, and printing functions on any web page. Your ignorance is quite hilarious. What really gets me is the reason why. “because our adversaries … would copy and/or print these pages to submit to the courts for use against parents in their dependency cases…. blah, blah, blah.” You put public information out in the “public” and don’t want anyone to use it for the wrong reasons. That should be self explanatory. If you don’t want someone to use it for the wrong reasons then password protect it or don’t publish it. It’s that simple.
Here is why this idiotic lawsuit is important. If for some insane reason she wins then search engine spiders will have to not only look for a robots.txt file but also the site’s copyright page which is impossible for the billions of web pages that are currently live. We haven’t come close to perfecting natural language search to automate reading a site’s content and determining the meaning of a phrase. So the only true way to not infringe on copyright law is to contact each and every single webmaster out there and request for indexing permission of their sites. Again… impossible. This is why we have the robots.txt file and the opt out agreement. It’s funny that Suzanna probably uses Google search and the Google Cache on a regular basis but either doesn’t realize it, is a hypocrit, or trying to cheat to make that extra buck.
My final opinion: I hope she fails miserably and has to pay for all court costs.
Update 1: Not sure if this is her but here’s a link to the lunatic: Google Image Result
June 8th, 2007 by 
Dave 
This is almost the best news I’ve heard all week. I def agree with Egotastic!
1 Comment »
It’s about damn time celebrities are held to the same standard as us “normal” people. I get sick and tired of hearing so and so got off on a technicality, a mis-trial, or some other lame excuse just so it doesn’t turn into a media feeding ground. 
