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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.

7 of 801 comments (clear)

  1. nooo!!!!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    ugh. stupid sue-happy idiots -_-

  2. Are there offline equivalents? by The+I+Shing · · Score: -1, Redundant

    So, in other words, if I take a photograph of a publicly-displayed billboard along a highway and keep that photo around for people to look at long after the billboard comes down, that would be illegal?

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  3. US Justice is stupid. by roynux · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Sometimes I use my brain.

    When will I be sued for remembering old stories and telling it to others ?

  4. Sue for the sake of suing by varmittang · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Man, that is all people do here in America, find ways to sue other people, just to get easy money. Its no longer about the hard work and gratification of making something, its all about the money.

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  5. They're toeing a fine line... by riflemann · · Score: -1, Redundant

    It's wonderful that archive.org are archiving all of these sites, but I've always wondered how they manage to avoid getting into all sorts of legal trouble regarding copyright, etc...

    Given the huge amount of potentially embarassing material out there, I'm surprised more people arent claiming copyright breach.

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  6. Wait... by jolande · · Score: -1, Redundant

    So you are telling me that if you actively post information on the internet for everybody to view, that they should not have the right to record anything that you make available? I say if you want to keep it private, don't put it in a public space to begin with. These are things we should have learned by now.

  7. DON'T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET! by Free_Trial_Thinking · · Score: -1, Redundant

    People, how many times have I said this?

    IF YOU DON'T WANT PEOPLE TO ACCESS YOUR INFORMATION, DON'T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET!

    As far as I'm concerned everything on the internet is public domain. It's the only way the internet can work.