Removing Your Site from the Wayback Machine

Re:Removing Your Site from the Wayback Machine by ghaff on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @09:30AM (#20164345)

Fair use does not give you the right to wholesale scrape content that is otherwise under copyright with a non-CC/open license, which is effectively what the Internet Archive does. (To be clear, I approve of IA's mission but it's in a legal grey area.)

robots.txt has never had much of a legal meaning. Respecting it was mostly a defense along the lines of "You only have to ask, even retrospectively, and we won't copy your content." As a practical matter, very few are going to sue a non-profit to take down content when they pretty much only have to send an email, (almost) no questions asked.

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Re:Removing Your Site from the Wayback Machine by JoshTriplett on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @10:20AM (#20164896)

> Fair use does not give you the right to wholesale scrape content

Yes, it potentially does. There are court cases establishing precedent that copying something in its entirety can still be fair use, as well as law and court cases establishing specific allowances for archives/libraries/etc.

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Re:Removing Your Site from the Wayback Machine by ghaff on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @10:30AM (#20165017)

There's probably an argument where archiving a particular site as a whole has some compelling public interest--say a politician's campaign site. But it seems unlikely that would extend to randomly archiving (and making available to the public) web sites in general.

I've always been told that fair use--as a defense against a copyright infringement claim--is very fact dependent.

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