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September 2, 2005
When a Robot breaks down...
Ah the robots.txt file...at the center of controversy in a landmark copyright infringement case.
Reading about this reminds me of the old opt-in, opt-out controversy. The Internet community claims that a website owner can OPT-OUT of search engine indexing via the robots.txt file, well folks like so much else in this day and age, that doesn't really work 100%.
This is the root of the lawsuit, and the first of its kind against an indexing of images, cached pages, without the expressed permission of the copyright holder. Many have opined about when/if this would happen to say Google. I have read that there is case law already allowing for thumbnails to be fair use and of course we all can see the usefulness and the legitimate fair use of an archive of the history of the Internet.
Libraries, the brick & mortar versions, get the publishers expressed permission. The Library of Congress has emassed its collection since deposit is a requirement of copyright registration. That again is with the copyright holders expressed permission.
Posted by photocartoonist at September 2, 2005 1:55 PM