http://realmeasures.dyndns.org

A couple things occur to me. Intentionally making repeated requests to a website until something breaks would seem to be tortious conduct, in and of itself. That could potentially get the trespass to chattels treatment that is becoming so popular.

Second, has anyone tried to see if this works on any other site? Is this mere speculation that the repeated attempts broke something? It seems difficult that even if the once-per-day request was broken, that a single user making successive requests could /. (slashdot) a server's return of a robots.txt.

If you read the lawsuit in depth, it's clear that something broke from repeated requests. I've made some speculations as to the gory details. But there's much material right in the lawsuit itself.

It may not have been that the time-out was at the target end, but rather the retrieving end - the Internet Archive can be notoriously slow sometimes, and they might have timed-out some processes.