john_k - 2:55 pm on Aug 12, 2004 (gmt 0)

Brewster's goal: Store everything. ``It is possible,'' he proclaimed last week at a conference at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose. ``It could be one of the greatest achievements of all time.''

A lot of things are possible. That doesn't mean that it is a good idea to do them, or that you have "entightelment" to other people's property simply because you thought of it.

If the project is important enough to do, then it is also too important to rely upon an outside commercial interest as its sole (or primary) data source. As others have said, they should build their own spider. Even if it takes a few years to get it right, what do they lose? 10 years of the early web. In the grand scheme of things, I would say that isn't too big of a deal. One hundred years from now, if this is the ONLY surviving archive, and it is missing the first ten years, it will still fall into the "that's unfortunate" category. But the world will still be spinning, and civilization won't be in worse shape for not having the data.

Build your own spider to collect your own data.