On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Thomas Dalton wrote:
[The Internet Archve]
need to do something to minimise the risk of illegal images being
archived.
Illegal according to whose defintion? The definition that applies
currently, or the defintion that applied at the time the page was
archived?
AIUI the archive is hosted in the US, so why should they care about
whether material is illegal in the UK? If they did they would also have to
care about whether material is illegal China, Afghanistan, Germany, Papua
New Guinea, etc, etc, etc.
The new UK law on extreme porn has made/will make illegal a huge number of
images that were not illegal previously - removing such images from
archived versions of pages is implying they were illegal at the time,
which they were not.
Equally, when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan all images of
people were illegal. Should then all images of people be removed from all
internet pages in the archive that might be accessed from Afghanistan? Or
perhaps just those webpages that were archived during that period in
Afghanistan's history?
Also, how would you propose finding all the images that are illegal by
whatever definition you choose? Remember that no only do you have to
check every sight archived (a susbstantial percentage of those on the
internet) but also every version of every site - for a busy site you're
talking up to 20 versions per year, maybe more.
Even if censorship of the archive were desirable (personnally I think it
is anything but) I just cannot see how it is achievable.
Chris
--
Chris McKenna
cmckenna(a)sucs.org
www.sucs.org/~cmckenna
The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes,
but with the heart
Antoine de Saint Exupery