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IP: Washington Post sending lawyer letters to copyright
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 19:06:54 -0400
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 15:58:46 -0800 From: Wulf Losee <WLosee () Getty Edu> To: lorracks () dworkin wustl edu Cc: farber () central cis upenn edu Subject: IP: Washington Post sending lawyer letters to copyright violators -Reply If Lorrie Cranor doesn't want to be hassled by lawyers with search engines, she should have her Web administrator change the configuration the robots.txt file on her Web server. The robots.txt file can be set to tell well-behaved search engines to avoid cataloging web pages that she'd rather the public not know about. Of course, the _Washington Post_ lawyers might have their own search engine running -- one that might ignore the robots.txt file. I've heard that some publishers, fearful of copyright infringement on the Internet, have financed their own search engines. In that case the best course would be to see if the Web administrator could implement some sort of passworded access to class-oriented web pages (certainly some, if not all, the web server brands offer that option). Of course this doesn't address the ethics of the situation. Fair use is a gray-area -- and I'm not so sure her use of the _Washington Post's_ material was fair. But if Lorrie Cranor wants to continue placing reprints of copyrighted material on her web pages, she might want to implement these precautions to avoid future hassles from copyright lawyers. Hope this was helpful... --Wulf ****************************************** ^-^ Wulf Losee / = Network Analyst , / | J. Paul Getty Trust (( / } \\ Vox: 310.656.5817 =/ = \\ Email: wlosee () getty edu ******************************************
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