[Air-L] on the Wayback Machine (was public/private [part 1 of 2])

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

textfiles.com?  or what I like to think of as 100000 dissertations  
waiting to happen.
On Aug 13, 2007, at 2:07 PM, Michael Zimmer wrote:

> I'm thinking more about less formal expressions than newspapers, etc
> - things people had little intent to be archived for posterity. Ie,
> the occasional posting to a usenet board (I used usenet in the early
> 90s having no clue that they would be archived, let alone indexed and
> searchable by my name over a decade later)...
>
> Is there a pre-Internet analog to having such informal utterances
> automatically - and often unknowingly - archived by 3rd parties who
> were not part of (nor mediated) the exchange?  I'm hoping someone can
> point to work critically exploring the ethics of the Internet Archive
> itself.
>
> -mz
>
> On Aug 13, 2007, at 12:29 PM, Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
>
>>
>> On Aug 13, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Michael Zimmer wrote:
>>
>>> This has been an interesting discussion, and mention of IA's Wayback
>>> Machine prompts interesting questions which I'm sure others on the
>>> list can help answer:
>>>
>>> (a) Are there other media forms (current or historical) where
>>> publishing content means that it is automatically scanned and
>>> archived by external aggregators (search spiders, Internet Archive,
>>> etc)? [If I posted a note on "The Wall" at Yale Law School, no one
>>> routinely takes a snapshot of the wall to keep a permanent record of
>>> it, right?]
>>
>> Journals, newpapers, magazines come to mind as archived externally
>> and internally.
>>>
>>> (b) If examples for (a) exist, are typical publishers of said  
>>> content
>>> aware that their works are being aggregated and archived in such a
>>> way?
>>
>> yes, and they try to get as much profit out of the arrangement as
>> they can, I think, but alas... it isn't always such an arrangement.
>>
>>> Would a new user know this? Are they notified?
>>
>> In the case of Newspapers, there were a few court cases a few years
>> ago dealing with the NYT archiving and distributing itself online,
>> but i don't recall anyone complaining about third party distribution
>> such as through firstsearch or similar tools.  I think that there is
>> now a standard contract in place for much of this in the publishing
>> industry.
>>
>>> [My concern here
>>> is that while many realize that search engines might crawl their
>>> content, few realize they keep a cached copy, and even fewer realize
>>> that even deleted content is archived by Wayback Machine]
>>
>>>
>>> (c) Also, if examples of (a) exist, what means are provided to
>>> prevent such automatic archiving? Is it opt-in or opt-out? How
>>> technically proficient must one be? [Concern here is that even if  
>>> you
>>> know about Internet Archive, you have to be proficient with
>>> robots.txt standards in order to keep them out]
>>
>> dunno, most organizations seem to want to participate, but only under
>> the best terms they can get
>>>
>>> (d) Given (a), how can someone remove past items from such archives?
>>> [Wayback Machine will remove all domain-specific content already in
>>> its archive if you place a robots.txt file to block it going  
>>> forward]
>>>
>>> I guess what I'm wondering is why there seems to be a presumption
>>> that just because I posted something on a website in 1999 I want it
>>> to always be accessible. Just because bits don't degrade like paper
>>> doesn't mean they -must- persist, does it?
>>
>> no, but shouldn't we preserve as much as we can?   I appreciate the
>> will to destroy, that's fine.  But for the people who do not care,
>> the content that they have contributed constitutes evidence of many
>> things.
>>>
>>> Keep up the good discussion,
>>> michael
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
>> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http:// 
>> aoir.org
>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://
>> listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>>
>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>> http://www.aoir.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// 
> listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/

Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  
(www.cipr.uwm.edu)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a  
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions,  
think. --Byron