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Author Topic: Can we be sued for wayback machine continuing to display the photo in question?  (Read 9619 times)

sadieb

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hxxp://wayback.archive.org/web/
Has anyone been sued for a photo on wayback machine.  Will they reomove all our sites if we order them to do so?
Isnt' that the same as with google we can order google not to cache our pages and they must comply as they are saving a copy of our copyrighted pages without our permission if we order them to not cache by a code in the meta tag?

Do we need to have way back and google delete and uncache our page if it has a copyright violation...

I note that the images are not on my site in wayback, they are on the wayback domain so is wayback the end user.. and would be liable since they are showing the photos on thier site and not on mine.. they are just claiming they found them on my site... but they are no longer there.....

So bottom line do we need a massive attack on wayback to remove all our sites since its possible there could be something on our page from a purchased template that we may not know is copyrighted.. and even if we found it and removed any questionable images.. they may still be in the google cache and the way back machine.
« Last Edit: May 25, 2011, 01:05:51 PM by sadieb »

Matthew Chan

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Wayback machine have noble intents but I think potentially, yes you could be sued for it.  But then again, I could sue you for no reason either.  People keep forgetting that people can be sued for anything for any reason.

But yes, they will delete every website presence you ask them to. However, domaintools is a for-profit that does the same thing.  In fact, I believe Getty/or one of the stock photo companies already use them as a backup to Wayback machine. 
I'm a non-lawyer but not legally ignorant either. Under the 1st Amendment, I have the right to post facts & opinions using rhetorical hyperbole, colloquialisms, metaphors, parody, snark, or epithets. Under Section 230 of CDA, I'm only responsible for posts I write, not what others write.

Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)

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adding a meta-tag to your pages directing robots to not archive should help going forward..I know archive.org will honor requests for removal, but not sure about domaintools.
Most questions have already been addressed in the forums, get yourself educated before making decisions.

Any advice is strictly that, and anything I may state is based on my opinions, and observations.
Robert Krausankas

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SoylentGreen

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My impression is that the copyright trolls use the archives to indicate how long an infringement might have existed.
That's after a "live" version has already been found online.

They're already chasing so many presently existing infringements that a lawsuit for an old infringement is unlikely.
Many places have provisions in law that a lawsuit must be timely.
That is, a lawsuit must be brought within a time that the plaintiff could have and should have known of the offending situation.

In any case, such a suit would be very weak.  The work of these archives tends to be rather "spotty".  There's no guarantee of accuracy.
You could simply say that the offending content on the archive was never part of your site, and it would be up to the other party to prove it.

Matt's right that people can sue for any reason, and this leads to abuse.
In our society, threats of lawsuits occur so often that these threats carry less and less weight over time.
I once had a job offer; the money was actually good, but the employment contract stated that they'll sue the employee in a certain situation.
Of course, that's a difficult thing to pull off.  But, it exposed the company workplace as "toxic".  Needless to say, I took my talents elsewhere.

buddhapi's right about the meta-tag.  But, I think that domaintools ignores those tags, as they're making money serving the copyright trolls these days.
If anyone has the IP address(es) of the domaintools robot spider, I'd like to know.
I want to add those to my .htaccess file, thereby blocking access to my site.
If your web server uses Apache, you can make an .htacess file, too.

I often wonder if we'll see more court "summary judgments" in the future.
If the courts ever become clogged with copyright cases, the system could save a lot of time by simply dismissing cases immediately wherein there's no proof of copyright ownership.

S.G.
« Last Edit: February 24, 2012, 02:08:17 AM by Matthew Chan »

mcairns

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I contacted the wayback website and told them of the issue with Getty and they happily removed all archives of my site.

sadieb

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Seems to me they would be obligated to remove them, and it also seems that the simple fact of storing a copy of you site for public consumption without your permission is a good reason to sue them.. Why don't we all get suit happy and sue each other... hell wonder why getty don't sue us all for slander.... calling them extortionists when they are supposed to be innocent till proven guilty... the guilty M...erF...ers.

Robert Krausankas (BuddhaPi)

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buddhapi's right about the meta-tag.  But, I think that domaintools ignores those tags, as they're making money serving the copyright trolls these days.
If anyone has the IP address(es) of the domaintools robot spider, I'd like to know.
I want to add those to my .htaccess file, thereby blocking access to my site.
If your web server uses Apache, you can make an .htacess file, too.

S.G.

According to domain tools...
Robots.txt
A. Is SurveyBot compliant? SurveyBot obeys all known guidelines. If SurveyBot is denied access to a site it will not include web content from that website. However it will still record miscellaneous information such as what web server the site is running and the status of the website (active/parked/deleted).
 
SurveyBot uses a User Agent field to idenfiy itself to websites. The user agent will look like:

SurveyBot/2.3 (DomainTools)

D. Opting-out of Crawling
SurveyBot only gathers one page per domain, the default document located at "/". But before we visit your website we will first consult the "/robots.txt" file to see if it has permission to crawl the entire site. SurveyBot bot looks for the following tags and that would stop the crawl and also remove your content from our website. The first tags bans all robots, the second group of tags only exclude SurveyBot.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: SurveyBot
Disallow: /

will post back when I get the ip address, as this would be the preferred method.

::EDIT:: It appears the Ip range for domaintools is 64.246.160.0 - 64.246.191.255 
« Last Edit: June 07, 2011, 09:38:44 AM by buddhapi »
Most questions have already been addressed in the forums, get yourself educated before making decisions.

Any advice is strictly that, and anything I may state is based on my opinions, and observations.
Robert Krausankas

I have a few friends around here..

Oscar Michelen

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I think SG nailed it on this issue.  Wayback will always clear their archive of your site upon request.

 

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