The Internet Archive Sued Over Stored Pages

Kailash Nadh writes "The Internet archive, which has been storing snapshots of millions of webpages since 1996 has been sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, Philadelphia. The firm was defending Health Advocate, a company in suburban Philadelphia that helps patients resolve health care and insurance disputes, against a trademark action brought by a similarly named competitor. In preparing the case, representatives of Earley Follmer used the Wayback Machine to turn up old Web pages - some dating to 1999 - originally posted by the plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia. Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive, saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive's database, was unauthorized and illegal." CT:update note that the submittor got it backwards: Healthcare Advocates is the sueing Wayback and Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, not the other way around.

Comments

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[donnyspi]

Better sue everyone who has visited the website in question but never purged their temporary internet files folder.

RTFA Addendum

[poena.dare]

The suit contends, however, that representatives of Harding Earley should not have been able to view the old Healthcare Advocates Web pages - even though they now reside on the archive's servers - because the company, shortly after filing its suit against Health Advocate, had placed a text file on its own servers designed to tell the Wayback Machine to block public access to the historical versions of the site.

So the robots.txt was added YEARS AFTER the site had been archived. I don't think they correctly used the "no-archive-time-travel" directive.

Re:We have this one every time...

[mattOzan]

However, the TFA also does mention that honoring the robots.txt is strictly voluntary and does not constitute a contract.

Shouldn't that be "...the f***ing TFA article also does mention..."