On Suzanne Shell and her war against the iGeeks*

Of course, this is about the latest controversy that’s doing the rounds on the net. About how the Internet Archive had infringed upon the copyright of the website she owns and maintains, one profane-justice.org. I’m just adding my two cents worth to the general hoopla that’s going around.

Of course, Mrs. Shell is correct in her observation, and I presume she knows her law when she claims “By entering this site you agree to the terms and conditions of the copyright” ( The text may not exactly be accurate since it appears as if a whole barrage of the iGeeks have bombarded her site with requests – the provider now says that the site has exceeded the allotted traffic usage.) That when a computer enters into a transaction of information, it is true that the computer is bound by whatever agreements that govern the information – in this particular case, copyright law. I claim no expertise in law, but one curious fact remains pretty unanswered to me: one regarding the language in which the copyright agreement is penned down. Any agreement, as far as common sense goes, must be in a language that both the parties can understand – there is no point in me signing, or agreeing to an agreement in Bahasa, if I don’t know that language, since I do not know what the provisions of the agreement are. However, if I were to really come across a notice in Bahasa Inggris on the front page, in an English novel, that says that I agree to turn in all of my assets by purchasing this novel ( exaggerated claim, but serves the purpose of illustration ) Even though it is full of English characters, it is most probable that I do not really give a damn about the content of the particular passage – even though it actually means a lot, atleast to the writer. In fact, unless I had prior information, I will have really no way to know that there actually exist terms and conditions related to the purchase of that particular novel.

Now translate this directly into this case, since Mrs. Shell claims her copyright was violated, in this case by the culprit, a computer program, and the backers behind it, The Internet Archive. An isomorphism of this kind is indeed possible, wait a second, lawyertypes. Now, as far as human knowledge goes, computers haven’t really had the abilities to ‘understand’: they can process something mechanically, without understand anything in whatever is being processed. And as far as the languages that they know, the spread is quite limited compared to the spread of human language. Now, Mrs. Shell’s site put the copyright in plain view on her site – hardly her fault. But expecting the computer program that was accessing her site, with the aim of storing a copy for posterity, is like making me, someone who knows only English, to buy a book that contains terms and conditions in Bahasa governing the purchase of the book to hand over my entire belongings to the publisher or the author. Look at the isomorphism – I do not know Bahasa, and so doesn’t the computer program know English. If Mrs. Shell had indeed found a way to make sure that the spiders were able to ‘understand’ and ‘abide by’ her terms and conditions of copyright, in a way that would have been acceptable to both the computer and herself, then her claim would have been completely agreeable. However, putting myself in the shoes of the computer program, all of her copyright just seemed to some more of zeros and ones, so I did not really care what they were, and rather went on ahead doing what I had been intended to automate: spider the internet and store it for posterity. If Mrs. Shell had indeed put it up in a way that I could understand, maybe a particular sequence of zeros and ones telling me that her site was copyrighted, and if I were to copy it I must pay up $5000 every page ( which, given the amount of unwanted ads and other stuf in the pages of the site, I’d rather spend buying truckloads of used toilet paper and sending it across), I would indeed have stopped in my tracks and notified my superiors. Surely, the administration of the Internet Archive cannot be blamed for not being able to write a computer program that can read a web page, scrutinize it carefully for any copyright statements, ‘understand’ it, and avoid doing anything explicitly and implicitly banned by them, since such a program has never been invented and indeed can never be done so for a long long time. However, if she really wants to go ahead and sue the Internet Archive people for violation of copyright, I guess it would be enough to show, with expert justification that such interpretation and understanding is a long way to come. Indeed, it is like suing me for not turning in my wealth according to the agreement in the book. Would you, really, Mrs. Shell?

Child abuse is a really thorny topic – and I really appreciate Mrs. Shell for boldly putting forth her views on that. But when it comes to computers, her online presence since ‘92, does not mean a thing, since computers are machines and there are limitations to what machines can do, and she does not know that. I really expected that someone with that much of internet exposure would know quite a bit or two about computers, and what they can do and what they cannot, but it seems my expectations were belied. And the iGeeks, as she loves to call them, even though they would have been toddlers when she began dabbling in the internet, have learnt quite a lot about the real world too – most of them aren’t some lame losers having nothing life to do except sit staring at a computer screen as she claims – but are quite brilliant and possibly the harbingers of the modern technology that she’s currently enjoying. Fox News isn’t my exact favorite news station, but as they asked in the case of Michael Crook, the question still lingers: Would she call your iGeeks as a bunch of lame losers if she had known that her website runs on a server written by a bunch of the same, even that the internet was built up, bit by bit, by the same, and given her the voice- the digital freedom of speech – to express and spread her own opinions and do what she wants to do? Would she call the hundreds working in Google, and the thousands working in Microsoft, the same bunch of old lame losers? They are also a part of the iGeek squad, as you like to call them. In the end, this only seems to be a sad attempt at a misinterpretation. I hope the courts hold up what is sense and what isn’t.