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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.
The archive is being sued by Health Advocates, not the legal firm that had defended Health Advocates. In fact, the legal firm is named in the suit as well.
And to clarify: its not a simple "you have our stuff stored on your systems" claim. Rather, Health Advocates is claiming that the archive failed to follow the instructions in robots.txt that were intended to prevent access to historical material.
..on at least two dates in July 2003, the suit states, Web logs at Healthcare Advocates indicated that someone at Harding Earley, using the Wayback Machine, made hundreds of rapid-fire requests for the old versions of the Web site. In most cases, the robot.txt blocked the request. But in 92 instances, the suit states, it appears to have failed, allowing access to the archived pages.
For the "I don't wanna rtfa because its early" crowd.
As it says in the article, the robots.txt is an entirely voluntary measure. The IA doesn't need to obey it, but they do, in order to be a courteous member of the internet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sorry, the writeup is bollocks. It says:
"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."
and also:
"Last week Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive".
So to believe the write up, they are being sued by BOTH parties.
However, it says, in TFA:
"... John Earley, a member of the firm being sued, said he was not surprised by the action, because Healthcare Advocates had tried to amend similar charges to its original suit against Health Advocate, but the judge denied the motion. Mr. Earley called the action baseless, adding: "It's a rather strange one, too, because Wayback is used every day in trademark law. It's a common tool."
Christ knows where the idea they they are being sued by the firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey came from.
Doesn't anyone else read the stories first? o_O
Larger images aren't cached on the archive servers, so they'd go to the real server. Most likely the original images weren't there so they started getting a flood of 404s and started investigating the problem.
The problem is that by allowing illegally obtained evidence, you are officially and legally endorsing criminal activity.
Who wins in a criminal vs criminal case? Would police officers be forced to fall on their own swords - ie commit criminal acts to gain evidence - on order of those above them? It also gives the thumbs up signal to vigilante justice too.
Oh, let's not also forget that it'd put the idea of court orders, seartch warrants, the right to be innocence until proven guilty (admittedly already fading), and a whole host of other rights in their graves.
There's just so much wrong with the idea of allowing illegal evidence, I'm surprised when anyone asks why it's wrong.
By nature of copyrights, everything that you create is automatically copyrighted the instant that you create an origial work. This post has already been copyrighted by me.
You don't HAVE to register the copyright with the Copyright Office in order to retain the copyright. Doing so though gains you added benifits in case there is a dispute. Published works ARE REQUIRED to be registered. However, just putting the website up does not count as publishing. In order to be considered published works, the work must be sold or otherwise have a transfer of ownership, or through rental, lease, or lending. They Copyright Office has even said "The reports also state that it is clear that any form of dissemination in which the material object does not change hands, for example, performances or displays on television, is not a publication no matter how many people are exposed to the work." (Source)
Oh man, that sucks! I guess I better turn off all caching in my browser, lest I get sued for copyright infringement, because it's storing and rebroadcasting copyrighted materials that you may no longer want me to see at later date.
However, if you RTFA'd, you'd know that lots of IP law firms use the Wayback Machine on a daily basis, and in fact, the company suing the Internet Archive is not suing them for republishing copyrighted information. Rather, the case is that they recently placed a robots.txt file on their site that disallows viewing historical versions of the website, and the Archive is being sued because the Wayback Machine apparently ignored the robots.txt file (which, I might note is a voluntary standard, and by no means implies a contract between the two parties), which the plaintiff claims violates the DMCA. This has nothing to do with copyright violation.
It has everything to do with robots.txt. Read.
--- What
From TFA:
So it appears that the basis of the lawsuit is that the robots.txt was NOT honored. The plaintiff claims that the robots.txt is a "contract" and that the wayback machine violated the contract by still allowing archived pages to be viewed in a limited number of attempts, for reasons unknown.
However, the TFA also does mention that honoring the robots.txt is strictly voluntary and does not constitute a contract.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
From the article:
Frivolous Lawsuit? Hardly.
Excellent Spin-doctoring on McDonald's Part? Absolutely.
Yeah, right.
I should have pointed out that the aspect of robots.txt they're complaining about is an "extension" of sorts where archive.org will remove any archived copies of your site if it disallows the ia_archiver spider *and* they submit their site to be recrawled (guaranteeing that the spider will see the new directive).
There are several law firms in the NY city area that pay to have every sidewalk and store front and such filmed on video... they then send that video into the state.... now when a person trips on a bad sidewalk they can get the case to court! i know.. you say WTF.. but its pretty simple. say there is a big upheaval in the sidewalk.. you trip, and try to sue the city for not maintaining its property, etc... (i am making this simple, there are all kinds of better examples but this is simpler). the city though will tell you and so will the courts that the city is not responsible. why? because you cant prove negligence. negligence is willfull, and not knowing there is a crack is not negligence. and here is the rub. being told that you have a problem and then ignoring it till something happens IS negligence. so in the past the lawyer would have to sepeona the cities records to see if someone reported the issue, if so, then great for the client, if not, their plum out of luck. so when the legal firm sends in the tapes, they are reporting the state of every block in that area... the city not looking at the tape that would define all the bad areas is negligence since now they DO have a method of seeing the problems and are ignoring them.. and voila, you now win cases that you couldnt before... so given that there is precident on such (and that store windows, especially in manhatten, are copyrightable, given that they are artistic displays!) my friend say i should have been a lawyer. :)
Can you sue a witness because he remembered the facts against you during a trial the same way the Wayback Machine is being sued because it "remembers" old facts and saying and has been used in courts?....
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.