A very interesting lawsuit was handed a very interesting judgment the other day in Colorado, in the case of a woman, Suzanne Shell, who filed suit against an internet search engine spider which “crawled” her site, indexing, as these spiders do, its…

It was clear that there was no “breaking and entering,” since one cannot break into that which is not closed. Theft? The contents were apparently open to the public. Racketeering? That’s off the wall.

If she wanted to restrict usage of the contents of her site, she could have done so by limiting access to the site. Apparently she didn’t, and she’s reaping her failure sow.

Should YouTube (Google) pay Videocom (or whoever) $1billion
or should Google charge Videocom for advertising their products online.

Should teenagers pay for wearing ‘Nike’ on their feet,
or should kids charge Nike for wearing their logo (like Jordan) - anyone out there making Nikes without the logo could be onto a winner for those who like the product but object to doing free advertising for a company.

You know like having windows Vista without the win logo
or an apple mac without the logo - I’m surprised there isn’t a worm coming out of that apple, yet

I went to the site, and tried to load the “robots.txt” file. 404 (file not found). (To see what a robots.txt file looks like, just access one…

I had no trouble viewing the page source — no mention of robots.

She seems to have no legs to stand on, having not used any of the standard methods to declare her site off-limits to spiders.

Oh, and in response to BlogReader, who thinks that requiring a website owner to use a standard method of saying no to spiders is like trying to blame the homeowner that he didn’t have a sign saying “don’t rob me.” — that’s ridiculous. She controls a website that sends webpages to anyone on the internet that makes properly formatted requests. A better (but still imperfect) analogy might be a someone who is handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, but places a small note next to the door saying that no one is allowed to give the candy to someone else. Neither Google nor anyone else is “breaking in” to her site: it’s an open webserver on the internet.

DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”
hppage status=”protected”
Copyright 1997 - 2007 Suzanne Shell and licensors. All Rights Reserved.
Source code not available

\
\
\

hopefully that will work better

”

”
(spaces added so the html parser on this thing didn’t eat the lines)
followed by a few hundred carriage returns….and then all the source code.

she keeps claiming they sued her first, but never says why…

There is also the question of what it takes to enter in to a contrat. Can a store put in small print by their door “if you enter this store you must spend a minimum of $300 before you may leave” (with right legal words), and then start sueing all the low spenders for breach of contract?

She should also go after some ISPs that cache web pages and anyone who uses a web browser that caches

Further, it is only the first page that has that strange qustion pop up. If you have a direct link in to the inside you don’t get that. And you can hit no and still view the site….

This whole thing is a publicity stunt. I kind of feel bad giving her more traffic to look at her site.

and her greatest sin is what ever she did to turn off copy and paste break firefox mouse gestures.