Web Site Sued: For Controversial Trip Into Internet Past

Summary

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The laws governing what can and cannot be cached, linked, or archived are pretty fuzzy. The Wayback Machine's policy, according to its Web site, is that it will exclude any site using the "robots.txt" directive to block the Machine's crawlers.

Every day, millions of Web sites are updated, and older versions are erased from existence with the click of a button. Founded by Brewster Kahle, an early Web archiving pioneer, the Wayback Machine is a part of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving data, texts, audio, Web sites, and other digital materials since the early days of the online revolution. Now, however, this nonprofit digital museum is embroiled in a lawsuit that has the potential to decide how poeple will be able to look back at the Internet from the future. Any decision against the Wayback Machine would draw the legal line in the sand for how and when copyrighted Web sites can be crawled and stored, and search engines and sites that employ crawlers will be keeping a close eye on the outcome of the Wayback Machine's lawsuit.

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Extract

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Web Site Sued: For Controversial Trip Into Internet Past

cyberspace doesn't give its travelers much room for reflection. Every day, millions of Web sites are updated, and older versions are erased from existence with the click of a button. Remember when Amazon.com sold only books? Or when WebCrawler ruled the search universe? The W...

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