Good day,

I have two quick requests:

1. At http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html#excluding, you mention that I can request that you stop indexing domains that I control. Therefore:
Could you please stop (or refrain from) indexing the following sites, and all of their subdomains?
mikesmit.com
ivoteonline.com
votesonline.com

2. Could you please remove any cached or stored versions of pages or content drawn from those sites?

Thank you very much,

-Mike Smit

February 9, 2006

Good day,

I am still waiting for a reply to this message.

I have confirmed that my copyrighted information has not been removed from the TurnItIn.com database as I requested.

Could you please reply with an explanation or an estimated timeline?

Thanks,

-Mike

Hello Mike, I'm sorry for not getting back to you sooner. We had a service upgrade with some of our databases in December so I was not able to remove you from our crawl list at that time, but all the issues have been resolved now and I have removed all your links from our crawl list. I am very sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused you and assure you that you will not be be bothered by our crawler any more...

Tim

Thanks Tim,

I appreciate you removing me from the crawl list.

The second part was: "2. Could you please remove any cached or stored versions of pages or content drawn from those sites?"

All of my material is copyrighted, as per the notice on the bottom of each page.

Could you confirm that you pulled content from MikeSmit.com out of the database?

Thanks,

-Mike

Hi Tim,

I waited 31 days, which seemed like a more than reasonable length of
time for you to have complied with my request.

Could you please confirm that you have removed all content from
MikeSmit.com from your database?

Thanks,

-Mike

Hello Mike,

Tim has indicated that you have some concerns about your copyrighted website material on our Turnitin.com database. I would be more than happy to discuss this will you, please let me know when a convenient time would be for you. In the meantime, you may wish to have a look at the follow article which is telling with regards to copyrighted content and web search: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php

I will be happy to discuss this issue with you and hope that we can resolve any issues without delay.

Best Regards,

Malik

Hi Malik,

Thanks for sending me that link.

First, Google allows webmasters to remove their URL from the search engine; the website will not be crawled, and no cached information will be used, if users follow the instructions at http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html. You can use their form, or a robots.txt file. I am not sure whether they are legally required to not cache my pages if I ask them to. But clearly it is either a legal requirement, or they, as good corporate citizens and courteous users of the Internet, allow me to remove cached content from their servers. Why don't you?

Second, the judgment you sent me refers multiple times to the fact the the plaintiff knew about Google, knew how to have his pages uncached, and specifically chose not to do so. In my case, the circumstances are very different - as soon as I learned about the TurnItIn Bot, I immediately asked that my pages no longer be crawled or cached. A few months and several follow-up emails later, you guys got around to it.

Third, web crawlers acquiescing to the wishes of webmasters, as expressed in emails or robots.txt files, is the industry standard. I've never encountered a legitimate business that refused to honour a politely worded request like mine. The only people who deviate from this norm are the spammers and link spammers who crawl the internet looking for email addresses and blogs to spam. iParadigms claims to be a legitimate business, so I expected that your policies and procedures on this issue would mirror those of other legitimate web crawlers.

Fourth, I notice that you haven't said "no" yet. Of course, you also didn't say yes. You mentioned that you want to 'discuss' the issue with me, though so far I seem to be doing most of the talking. :)

Fifth, I read on your website that if universities ask that material be removed from your servers, you will honour that request. Clearly the technical capability exists; I am not sure why this is an issue worthy of discussion.

> I will be happy to discuss this issue with you and hope that we can resolve > any issues without delay.

The ship has sailed on that one - I sent in my original request on December 3, 2005. We're at about the 100 day mark.

Thanks very much for your time,

-Mike

Hello Mike,
Thank you for your email. As per your request earlier this year, we have stopped crawling your website, and will continue to respect the request.
Regards,

Malik

Thanks Malik,

That is great news. Well, not news really, since Tim already let me know about this.

I couldn't help but notice that your email specifically avoided the question that you originally emailed me about. What about the information from my website which is currently stored on your servers? Will you follow the accepted standard practice and remove it at my request?

Thanks,

-Mike

Hello Mike,

We will work to have your data removed from our database by the end of next week. I hope that this is acceptable to you.

Regards,
Malik