Getty in Switzerland: this time with LAWYERS letter

[Jerry Witt (mcfilms)]

This simply means someone (you? your web developer) created a robots.txt file instructing visitors from archive.org not to create a "snapshot" of your site. Various web servers will send out automated web agents to spider through your site and either index the content (for search), archive the content. or even scrape the content for their own use. You can request these agents not to do this through the robots.txt file.

Unfortunately, bad agents will visit your site and ignore the robots.txt file. If your hosting company charges you for bandwidth, they are essentially stealing from you. Sadly, at this time it is not illegal to ignore robots.txt. So what it means is that although archive.org doesn't have a snapshot of your site, if you got a letter then you adversary likely does.

[Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)]

I'm wondering if picscout has now developed something like their own archiver, and maybe are not using archive.org or domain tools as widely. I don't know if domaintools.com follows or ignores robot.txt files, but I do know that it's hard to impossible to get your archived materail deleted from there.

[Matt]

Hello everyone!

Sorry for this late update. So here is the latest situation:

1. I didn't get any reply from the photographer who originally took the photo (I contacted him through his official website).

2. A new letter arrived at the end of August from the same lawyers. Nothing new. They just wanted 1.800 CHF for the photo. Interesting is, they say that they made a calculation and decided for this price as if we have been using the photo for 3 years! (I know it wasn't more than a month or two for 300% sure).

Anyway, after few days I remembered: I had a new website. It was online for only less than 2 years. So, it is not possible that the photo was on my website for 3 years as they claim. I don't know how does change the whole situation, but I can prove this. So, please let me know your thought on this. What do you think?

Meantime, I didn't reply on the letter. They said they'll contact us within 2 weeks if we don't pay the amount they want. It's been almost 2 moths now since then. We'll see what will future bring.

[Jerry Witt (mcfilms)]

I'm sure they would LOVE to engage you in a conversation about how long you had it on your site. If and when you decide to engage them, I would say it's important (especially in your circumstance) to admit nothing. The general strategy of making them prove they have rights to the image appears to have been very effective here in the States.

[lucia]

The result was a page that said: "Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt."

Did the "Robots" crawl and find anything or not?

Thanks a million for your help!

robots.txt is a file you-- the website owner-- would place on your site. It's possible to instruct "robots" to stay off your site. You can give instructions to individual robots or all robots.  There is a protocol for writing this file.

If the wayback machine tells you it's excluded that means someone who controls your site (possibly you) wrote an instruction to keep the wayback's robot of your site. The lines would be found in a file called "robots.txt" which the wayback machine obeys.  If it finds those lines, it both stops visiting your site and won't show any archives it's already made.

However, not all robots obey robots.txt. So, it entirely possible for some other robot to crawl your site and make copies of what they want. (Well... unless you block them with something real-- like .htaccess, a firewall or something else.)

[Khan]

I found something

Please read this link (Gast August 31)

http://www.abmahnwelle.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=155&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=31259f0598c831408ac191fb67524dfd&start=60

I think that they want you to give information about the time to get a case. Otherwise they are just guessing and will have problems if they go to court. If you want  to write something just ask for poof of ownership (contracts etc) .

Khan

[Matt]

RESULTS FINALLY:

Shortly; I got a court letter with a date to appear.
I decided to go and see how can we close this whole thing.
I arrived at the court. It was basically one person (magistrate) & a representative of the lawyers. It was all very peaceful. I expected a lot of angry people, but exactly the opposite happened. Each side told it's story.
We agreed; I pay 1/3 of the original price what they wanted & we all went home satisfied.
I did a mistake and it was ok to pay for it. Finally, I learned the lesson. This is it. Just that you people know.

Hello everyone!

Sorry for this late update. So here is the latest situation:

1. I didn't get any reply from the photographer who originally took the photo (I contacted him through his official website).

2. A new letter arrived at the end of August from the same lawyers. Nothing new. They just wanted 1.800 CHF for the photo. Interesting is, they say that they made a calculation and decided for this price as if we have been using the photo for 3 years! (I know it wasn't more than a month or two for 300% sure).

Anyway, after few days I remembered: I had a new website. It was online for only less than 2 years. So, it is not possible that the photo was on my website for 3 years as they claim. I don't know how does change the whole situation, but I can prove this. So, please let me know your thought on this. What do you think?

Meantime, I didn't reply on the letter. They said they'll contact us within 2 weeks if we don't pay the amount they want. It's been almost 2 moths now since then. We'll see what will future bring.

[lucia]

1) robots.txt is a file an administrator can create that lets them place the equivalent of a "do not walk on grass" sign on their site.
2) 'robots' are programs people write to do things like crawl pages.
3) In principle, the robot.txt 'protocol' to permit administrators to create a 'do not walk on grass sign' and polite robots would be programmed to read that file. If a robot has a name (for example 'fred')  noticed a note in 'robots.txt'  says either " fred, do not walk on grass", or "no robot may walk on the grass, and the person who created the robot made it 'polite' it will 'not walk on the grass'. 
4) the wayback.org machine is 'polite'. So if you tell it to stay off the grass, it will.
5) When you see that message at the wayback.org it means it (a) read robots.txt, (b) saw robots.txt contained a note that told it to stay out so (c) robots.txt stays out. It's telling you that it read the "keep out" sign.

Note: in this context, "stay off grass" means: keep out of my site.

Also: there is no law saying robots must obey the "stay out" message. But archive.org does obey such messages.