Son #1, who's interest is in technology and law, informs me that government
websites are in the public domain and it would be OK to "mirror" them, with
one's own server. (I'd like to verify this.)
Then there are probably issues of making such a mirrored web site available
on the internet -- as it would not longer represent government positions,
official information, etc. and this could be confusing to people. It could
be construed as sedition. ??? Making it available as an historical resource
would probably require some repackaging.
The issue of space is a matter of estimating -- if we assume that a web page,
on average is about 200K, then 50,000 of them would be 10 GBytes, (an 80GB
drive cost about $80 today). So a complete copy is physically is doable,
even if I have underestimated by a substantial factor.
"Wacking" the entire web site is another issue, if done automatically by
software. I have not looked into this lately, but some dramatically increase
the number of files in order to handle links, references to external images,
etc.
More looking, technically, legally, seems appropriate. In the meantime
changes are happening.
This is an update that indicates government archiving:
http://www.edweek.com/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=06web.h22
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Dec 01 2002 - 01:00:08 PST