Marketing News: Law Suit Over Page Access Filed Against Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has been hit with a copyright infringement law suit for crawling the Internet and copying web pages from Healthcare Advocates without permission. Though Healthcare Advocates has utilized a robots.txt file, they claim that its pages have still been accessed on 92 occasions. Healthcare Advocates further claim that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provisions of '‘circumventing' the robots.txt file exclusion has been violated by the law firm getting these pages.

Some may find this law suit ridiculous. After all, it sounds like a search engine is being sued for copyright infringement. Some believe that there is no legal bearing to the second claim as robots.txt is a voluntary opt-out measure for crawlers. Further, robots.txt can't exactly be circumvented in order to view a page since there isn't anything in a browser to prevent one from viewing pages blocked by robots. txt. It would seem that the lawsuit is less about copyright infringement and more about Internet Archive being sued for allowing pages to be seen regardless of the robots.txt block.