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The Internet Archive Sued Over Stored Pages

Posted by timothy on from the philadelphia-lawyers dept.

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.

5 of 801 comments (clear)

  1. summary is incorrect by paulbd · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:summary is incorrect by kevmo · · Score: 5, Informative

      HealthCARE Advocates is suing, not Health Advocates. There is a trademark case of Healthcare Advocates (plaintiff) suing Health Advocates (defendant). The legal firm defending Health Advocates digged up the old archive. HealthCare Advocates, the plaintiff, got desperate and is suing the legal firm and IA probably in order to try to exclude whatever evidence the defense legal firm dug up.

      I guess you were trying to be informative, but in this case it makes a big difference as to which company is doing the lawsuit. Its the plaintiff, not the defendant.

  2. Information Extracted by inkdesign · · Score: 5, Informative

    ..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.

  3. Oops! by Marc2k · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    --- What
  4. Re:Who has the right right to store store windows? by Artfldgr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. :)