[click170]

I was going to reply pointing out that whether or not to name and shame someone is a subjective decision which you and I do not see eye to eye on, and which generally requires quite a few people to agree with you before it becomes a problem for the shamee, but then I rembered the poor way that IA handles changes in ownership with respect to robots.

When IA stops wiping out historical content due to a change of domain ownership in the now then I will have more support (and USE) for them.

[icebraining]

How is IA supposed to distinguish a new website from a sincere wish to delete old stuff? A change in domain registration data means nothing; I have a domain that I registered for an association in my name, and which I then sold to them (for a symbolic price), but it was only an administrative issue - the site was the same.

IA is on iffy territory w.r.t. copyright as it is; if they stop respecting robots.txt, they could get into a world of hurt.

[ghaff]

Your last sentence is key. As I understand it, there's no real legal precedent for IA which basically copies everything out there on an opt-out basis. I personally am glad they do but one of the ways they get off with it is by treading as lightly as possible, including respecting robots.txt even retroactively.

They're also non-commercial, broad in scope, arguably serve a valuable scholarly function and have other characteristics that have kept them mostly out of legal hot water. But it's unclear to what degree they're legally different from a site that decided to create an archive of all comics, commercial and otherwise, and slap advertising up.

[ersii]

Internet Archive isn't wiping out historical content. It's just unavailable/hidden for the time being. (As long as there is a restrictive robots.txt available).