Re Lauren's Blog: "A Terrible Decision by the Internet Archive May Lead to Widespread Blocking"

["David Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "John Levine" <johnl () iecc com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Lauren's Blog: "A Terrible Decision by the Internet Archive May Lead to Widespread Blocking"
Date: April 22, 2017 at 3:41:05 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net

In article <CAKx4triKeqLRP0ExSqfENAW5FNu4oKuB-ZyurpW8yibxAVDcTg () mail gmail com> you write:
> It's not clear to me that RES has no legal force. Perhaps somebody with
> greater knowledge could say here whether it has actually been tested.

The 2006 case Field vs. Google, where Field sued Google for copyright
infringement for spidering and cacheing his web site, established that
Google's spidering and cacheing of web sites was a legal fair use.
The decision specifically called out robots.txt and robots meta-tags
that allow site operators to control indexing, and noted the fact that
Field had put a robots.txt on his site that allowed Google to index
it.  Had there been no robot exclusion standard or worse, if Google
had ignored it, the judge might well not have been as sympathetic to
Google's position.

https://www.wsgr.com/PDFSearch/Field_Order.pdf

I've seen other cases that cited robots.txt in similar ways.  In
Canada in 2011, Century 21 vs. Zoocasa was about a real estate
aggregator site (Zoocasa) copying content from another (Century 21)
without permission.  The judge found against Zoocasa, and noted that
they'd ignored robots files that told them to stay away.

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/11/2011BCSC1196.htm

So it hasn't specifically been tested, but courts are aware of it
and find it relevant.

R's,
John







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