Colorado Woman Suing for Page Crawling?
We all know that United States of America has become a very litigious society where filling a lawsuit is become more and more common. But, this article from InformationWeek about a Colorado woman suing the Internet Archive for crawling her website despite a notice on her website clearly prohibiting its copying for any reason. The woman even goes on with a very detailed legal agreement in another page.
Computers can enter into contracts on behalf of people. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) says that a “contract may be formed by the interaction of electronic agents of the parties, even if no individual was aware of or reviewed the electronic agents’ actions or the resulting terms and agreements.” This presumes a prior agreement to do business electronically.
So what constitutes such an agreement? The Internet Archive, which spiders the Internet to copy Web sites for posterity (unless site owners opt out), is being sued by Colorado resident and Web site owner Suzanne Shell for conversion, civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act.
Now this is taking hair splitting to the extreme. Here is an interesting commentary on what is now being debated.
ln a post on law professor Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law blog, attorney John Ottaviani, a partner at Edwards & Angell in Providence, R.I., says the issue is “whether there was ‘an adequate notice of the existence of the terms’ and a ‘meaningful opportunity to review’ the terms.”
I am definitely no lawyer and have not legal training whatsoever. But, here is my attempt to summarize. It is being argued that Internet Archive’s web crawler having visited and copied the website of Mrs. Shell COULD BE legally bound by the DO NOT COPY notice posted on the said website. This COULD BE a violation of the UETA (machines entering into contract with other machines) because the Internet Archive’s web crawler COULD HAVE entered into an agreement with Mrs. Shell’s website.
However, I could also argue in the point of view of the “other” machine. There is a generally accepted principle that websites that do not want to be crawled can specify a Robots.txt file to control the behavior of any crawler to have their site excluded. Internet Archive’s web crawler could have simply complied with this generally accepted principle and acted in good faith. Couldn’t that be a counter argument too? Of course, don’t take my word for it.
