At 05:26 PM 12/13/96 -0800, Brewster Kahle wrote:
>Hi, My name is Brewster Kahle. I work at the Internet Archive, and I just
>wanted to clarify what we are doing.
>The Internet Archive is archiving the public information on the net. We
>think it is important to make a record of this historically interesting
>transformation. We have already found researchers interested in the data,
>and we think useful services will grow out of the data as well.
So you "think it's important" to make unauthorized copies of my copyrighted
web pages without asking me first? Well, I'm certainly glad you think
it's important, but sorry, it's illegal.
That, however, is an issue for another list, as it's not about mailing
list management.
>As we crawl the web, we are obeying the robot.txt file and other "keep out"
>signs.
(I've heard this to not be true. In other words, I've heard reports
that your indexer does _not_ obey the robots.txt file, despite what
you and your web page may claim.)
>We are not collecting mailing lists. There are a couple of groups that we
>know of that are. We have asked both to make donations of the data they
>collect. Since in many cases the data is not meant for the limited
>audience of the mailing list participants, we are not sure what we should
>do with the data when we get it other than just store it for historical and
>scholarly study.
Please tell me who these other groups are, besides FindMail.com. The
fact that FindMail.com's primary DNS comes from archives.org's name-
server leads me to believe that there's more of a connection between
the two groups than you're admitting to here.
I'll also note that at no time was _I_ ever asked if the "data"
collected from my mailing lists _was_ meant for the limited audience
of the mailing list participants. I find it extremely arrogant that
you or FindMail.com would assume, without asking me, that mail sent
sent only to a select list of subscribers is nevertheless, somehow,
meant for a broader audience than those it was sent to.
That kind of assumption is preposterous!
>I posted a draft RFC to this list a month or so ago that would signal that
>a posting should not be archived by putting a "restrict:
>no-external-archive" line in the mail header. This was not meant to be a
>license for people to archive all that does not have that header, but to
>indicate that the poster does not want it to happen. This parallels the
>"x-no-archive: yes" netnews header of deja-news.
I remember that. I thought it was bogus in the extreme, and I can't
imagine there are many people using it, unless they've automatically
put it on every list they run, like garlic, to keep your variety of
archivampires away from the necks of their mailing lists.
As I said then -- the procedure should not be "put this in your headers
if you don't want to be archived." The procedure _should_ be, "put
this in your headers if you DO want to be archived." But, of course,
you couldn't archive very much if we did things that way, eh?
Oh, I'm sorry -- I mean "those other organizations". I forgot that,
despite writing an RFC about archiving other people's lists without
their permission, you're actually doing nothing of the sort. Uh huh.
>If anyone is interested in this topic, please write directly or back to
>this list. We have a list about some of the topics of archiving called
>archivists@archive.org. Please participate!
Feh. I might subscribe, but I'm sure I'd spend all my time flaming
rabid archivampires who are out to suck the blood of every list on
the net in the name of "archiving for posterity and research". This
"data" you so flippantly toss around is not yours -- it belongs to me,
and the people on my lists. And we'll thank you to ask first before
fanging us.
>-brewster
--Kynn, told you who I am enough times already
--
/\ /\ /\ /\ Kynn Bartlett / kynn@idyllmtn.com
/ \ / \/ \ / \ Idyll Mountain Internet
/ \ //\ /\ \ / \ <URL:http://www.idyllmtn.com>
'_| _` // \/ \__\ '_| _` HTML Writers Guild Governing Board Member
|
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