Wayback Machine at Risk

A Colorado resident Susan Shell sued the Wayback Machine service (Internet Archive) , accusing him of “spiders” of violating laws.

Wayback Machine spider robots index sites and save copies of all pages for posterity. With this service you can see how a particular site looked a month or a year ago; use it and in order to find content already removed from a site.

In US law, there is the concept of "contract concluded as a result of the interaction of electronic agents." Such a contract may be concluded even if the user is not notified of this.
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Susan Shell’s own site has a warning that if a visitor copies or distributes the site’s content, they should familiarize themselves with the “contract” posted on a separate page. Thus, Susan accuses the “spiders” of the Wayback Machine of violating this contract. At the same time, she does not seem to care about the fact that robots cannot be aware of the content of the contract; In addition, the site does not have a robots.txt file.

Lawyers are currently pondering how correct and adequate is the type of “contract” representation that the search engines provided to Susan Schell. If the court takes the side of the plaintiff, finding the lawsuit justified, then Internet companies seem to have to teach their robots to understand user agreements. Moreover, not only Wayback Machine automatically saves copies of pages on its servers ...