[300bps]

I agree with your general point but your example is not correct

The Internet Archive makes it very easy to remove content from their site. I had a family web site accessible to the public for 12 years with about 25,000 pictures on it. For various reasons I took the site down but archive.org still showed the pictures. A quick change to robots.txt stopped that though. Basically, even if the archive grabbed the files at a point in time they periodically check to make sure they still have the right to those files in robots.txt. If they don't, they won't display them. I was vey impressed with them when I learned this.

[ghaff]

It's also IMO a reasonable question what the "right" behavior should be in such a situation. I'm tempted to make the argument that once content has been made available to the world and archived by the Internet Archive, my descendants or a new corporate owner shouldn't necessarily have the right to remove that content from public view at some time in the future.

[bcRIPster]

I'm in this camp. I owned a 4 letter TLD that I was first registrant on in 1994 and held it until I sold it in 2001. I had lots of interesting things published on the site and as soon as the new owner took the domain, he put up a robot.txt blocking the site my years of content disappeared from the archive. :(

I keep toying with the idea of trying to buy the domain back but it's value has become somewhat prohibitive. Maybe when I win the lottery :/

[rwmj]

Make sure you maintain control over the domain and always have a robots.txt file present, because if you ever lose that, those files will become visible again. Good luck arranging for your descendents to do this after you die.

[dredmorbius]

"If you cannot place the robots.txt file, opt not to, or have further questions, email us at info at archive dot org."

http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#2

[hnha]

just mail them, they are nice people.

[themonk]

it would be nice to have some standard method to delete the content.

[dredmorbius]

Emailing them is the standard method.

Sometimes, you know, you've got to, like, talk to people.

[axelfreeman]

I did this with my old website and it worked great.

[duskwuff]

I'm pretty certain that this isn't the case. If anything, it's the other way around - if a domain changes hands, and the new owner sets up a restrictive robots.txt, the content in the archive is made unavailable, and stays unavailable even if the robots.txt (or the whole domain) later disappears.

[antitrust]

This has been my experience as well. Once the content is deleted, it's gone.

[rwmj]

This is not true.