The Internet Archive recently announced that it is no longer being sued over a potential DMCA violation; the parties have settled out of court. This is great news. It would be a shame if a organization of such high social utility as the IA had to spend its meager resources in court defending itself.
Having said that, there is one thing I find disappointing in the announcement, namely that the terms of the settlement are confidential. I understand that lawyers like to do this, but in this case, there were a lot of interesting legal issues at play, some of which were touched upon earlier in a thoughtful post by William Patry. The most important concerned whether the robots.txt file constituted an effective technological access control mechanism (in DMCA terms). In light of the discussion of this issue in the Google contract, it would be nice to know whether the plaintiffs finally agreed that their arguments were bogus, or whether IA admitted they were in violation of the law, or whether the issue was not even discussed.
I guess the Internet Archives committment to "universal access to human knowledge" and its belief that "open and free access to literature and other writings... [is] essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society" does not extend to its own legal documents.
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