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August 2, 2007
If the Wayback Machine Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Web Archives
Score one for common sense as a US district court judge decides visiting the Wayback Machine to look at Web content doesn't constitute "hacking:"
"As far as the Harding firm knew, no protective measures were in place in regard to the archived screenshots they were able to view. They could not avoid or bypass any protective measure, because nothing stood in the way of them viewing these screenshots. The Harding firm did not use alter code language to render the robots.txt file void like the defendant in Corley did with the encryption," said [Judge Robert] Kelly.
The judge also said the robots.txt file, which is supposed to instruct Web spiders about which pages they can visit or index, doesn't necessarily constitute a "security measure," circumvention of which would violate the DMCA.
He stopped short of jailing the lawyers who tried to characterize the Wayback Machine as a giant cracking tool, so common sense loses a point, too.
Heck ... don't even bother awarding any points to common sense. It's just a district judge saying this. The lawyers who thought up this particular abuse of the DMCA have all sorts of chances to gull someone further up the appeals process.
Posted by mhall at 6:09 PM | Add Comment
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