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Key point given the current climate, if the Trump presidency adds a restrictive robots.txt to all .gov domains they will prevent the Internet Archive Wayback Ma
by Smerity 10y ago
Key point given the current climate, if the Trump presidency adds a restrictive robots.txt to all .gov domains they will prevent the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from showing history on any of those domains.
Not only would this obliterate public access to the Obama, Bush, Clinton era government websites in the archive, it'd prevent the use of the Wayback Machine for keeping track of Trump's shifting agendas, as demonstrated on his web domain recently.
- ghaff 10y agoGovernment documents including, I assume, web pages are in the public domain.
- dragonwriter 10y agoThat's irrelevant; the issue isn't copyright, but the implementation of the Internet Archive, which applies robots.txt retroactively to archived versions of pages as well as respecting it currently.
- jeff_tyrrill 10y agoBut the reason the Internet Archive applies robots.txt retroactively is copyright, as explained in a sibling to the grandparent.