On Sunday 30 October 2005 09:34 am, Bob Danielson wrote:
> Now, if you use the wayback machine to search on
> VTR.org you get a return message that says: "We're sorry, access to
> http://www.vtr.org has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt"
>
> What does that mean?
> The Standard for Robot Exclusion (SRE) is a means by which web site owners
> can instruct automated systems not to crawl their sites. Web site owners
> can specify files or directories that are allowed or disallowed from a
> crawl, and they can even create specific rules for different automated
> crawlers.
The content of the VTR's robots.txt is:
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
This blocks the entire site for anybody with the user agent cited, but not for
anyone else. In fact, I ran a webcrawler against the site and it only
retrieves the free content, so the robots.txt entry seems like overkill.
Does VTR have some "right" to limit access to their content. Yes, especially
since they claim a copyright to their original content. Copyright ownership
is arguable with regard to other non-original material, especially with
contributed content like the tech articles. If the contributors knowingly
assigned all rights to VTR, that's one thing, but if not, the authors (and
they alone) retain copyright ownership (in the US anyway) and may re-publish
the information in an other venue. But can VTR still limit access? Sure --
it's their site.
Do you want certain information freely available on the web? Write it
yourself. Facts can't be copyrighted; their presentation can. If you want no
or few restrictions placed on the re-distrubution or use what you write, I
suggest looking at the Creative Commons License at
http://creativecommons.org/.
For what it's worth, I'm a VTR member and a published author.
--
Hoyt
1954 TR2 TS561L
1959 TR3A TS33111L
1960 TR3A TS43923L
1960 TR3A TS74076L
1961 TR3A TS63304L
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