The Internet WayBack machine (was Re: vim syntax checking for filepro)

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On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 03:18:46PM -0400, Kenneth Brody thus spoke:
> I wonder if they respect robots.txt settings?

That's advisory, at best.  It's not supposed to be, but in reality, nothing
forces anyone to honour it.

> While on the topic, consider that search engines such as Google
> often keep at least one cached copy of the website on their servers.

Same situation.  Technically, I think you could actually hit them with a
DMCA notice, -especially- if you have a copyright boilerplate on your site,
as many do.

I'm surprised it hasn't been an issue, what with the overly-litigious
society we have, and Google's deep pockets...  Probably the key thing is
being able to prove damages, if you went after them for a civil suit.
However, a DMCA takedown notice doesn't require damages, only a request.
And that legislation provides for -criminal- damages, not just civil ones,
for copyright violation.

That's a bit of a problem.

Makes me wonder about the precarious position of companies which
screen-scrape data from sites, repackage it, and provide it as a service...
I guess the question becomes whether that data is under copyright or
not.  If it's out in the open, and it's not subject to copyright, the DMCA
wouldn't apply.  If it's supposed to be behind locked authentication and
there's no circumvention, unauthorised access statutes wouldn't apply if no
reasonable effort were made to secure it.  So really it's down to
the copyright on the information, and whether there is one.  Pretty much
anything has implicit copyright.  Whether you cede it to a service like FB
or Twitter if you post it is another story, but then you're giving it to an
even bigger fish with bigger land sharks which could go after Google and
MS.  But everything has provenance of some sort.  

So why isn't there a feeding frenzy?

It is an interesting thing to explore, though...

m->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.