incrediBILL - 2:41 pm on Jul 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

Did you people actually read the article about the suit?

ROFLMAO

Basing a lawsuit on robots.txt which is voluntary at best, it's not even a mandatory protocol although people wish it were.

"We're suing you because you didn't voluntarily support this!"

Oh my.

Are these people smoking crack or what?

Had they actually just blocked ia_archive from accessing the server, or it's IPs, or asked the internet archive to REMOVE their listings (there is documented methods for doing this on the archives web site) then this wouldn't be an issue.

If you read closely, they claim the lawyer was accessing pages on THEIR server via the archive, they found entries in the log file, which would imply the pages were dynamic and not even cached unless I'm misreading this.

What about search engines that maintain old cache of pages for YEARS that are long gone, I know Google's still clinging to a couple of mine that don't even exist anymore.

It's a HUGE slippery slope, where does this all end?

So in summary this case about the plaintiff wanting the court to find the defendant at fault because the plaintiff was technically inept in proper server administration and failed in their feeble attempt to restrict the defendant from their servers.

Had they only read WebmasterWorld they would've known how to do it right the first time!