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Re:Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private by Smerity on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @10:46PM (#13068331)
Key point given the current climate, if the Trump presidency adds a restrictive robots.txt to all .gov domains they will prevent the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from showing history on any of those domains.

Not only would this obliterate public access to the Obama, Bush, Clinton era government websites in the archive, it'd prevent the use of the Wayback Machine for keeping track of Trump's shifting agendas, as demonstrated on his web domain recently.

Re:Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private by ghaff on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @11:43PM (#13068543)
Government documents including, I assume, web pages are in the public domain.
Re:Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private by dragonwriter on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @01:15AM (#13068841)
That's irrelevant; the issue isn't copyright, but the implementation of the Internet Archive, which applies robots.txt retroactively to archived versions of pages as well as respecting it currently.
Re:Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private by jeff_tyrrill on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:29AM (#13069466)
But the reason the Internet Archive applies robots.txt retroactively is copyright, as explained in a sibling to the grandparent.