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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.
fsck me if i'm wrong, but wouldn't this be similar to suing someone for referencing an old book I wrote, just because I'd released a new one that didn't contain much of the old information?
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Did they set up their robots.txt file properly? If not, they may not have a case.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Better sue everyone who has visited the website in question but never purged their temporary internet files folder.
Would that make archived newspaper editorials, TV reports, etc. illegal as well? Google beware.
Looking forward to newspapers filing similar frivolous lawsuits against libraries for maintaining old copies of the papers in their collections; copies that newspaper company might be embarassed about now.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
....why not just ask them to take them off?
Wouldnt this reference site be covered under some of the same protections as a library. It serves some of the very same purposes.
Hopefully this falls flat.
I wonder where the server are locations
Pablo
Lawsuits these days sound more like people whining like spoiled brats than someone really done an injustice.
They publish the thing, person X stores it, person Y uses stored info to prove they publish it. So what? If they'd written the thing in a newspaper they would sue someone for keeping the newspaper?
Huh
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Would a lawsuit be considered if instead of a cache of web pages, the other side had used old newspapers from the library or VHS recordings of an old television broadcast? Once they've put their web pages into the public, don't they lose control of who keeps a copy?
I'm not saying that legally they don't have a legitimate case, but is it really necessary to persue an organisation such as the Internet Archive over something so passive as this? In my opinion, hell no it isn't.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
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.
They got caught with their pants down and now are suing because someone kept the evidence. Boy do I hope this lawsuit meets a swift and decisive end in favor of the Internet Archives.
To be candid, I'm surprised it took this long for someone to sue them.
So, they want to make their webpage freely available to the entire world, but they don't want people to download the pages? Make up your fucking mind, if you're going to put something on the internet, people are going to download it.
..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.
There is a Wayback machine mirror in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It would be very difficult for them to find any legal basis in Egypt to get this one offline.
Assuming the judge has more than one brain cell then this case should take no more than 30 seconds and will be summarised in two sentences.
"You published information on a public medium. Case mismissed."
But then again this is America we're talking about.. home of the idiot lawsuit and lunatic judicial decisions so I don't hold out much hope for the triumph of reason...
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
The writeup says the archive is being sued by Harding et al. Then later it says it's being sued by one of those Health companies.
I didn't even pick up on the fact there were two similarly named health care companies!
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Stella!
And they said zombies weren't real!
Possibly because they are making a copy of copyrighted material and distributing such a copy or making it available for download. Is this fundamentally different from for example recording music from radio or shows from TV and redistributing them?
A century from now all profit will be gathered from suing one another about IP & copyright rights :)
-- Sig down
Why does Slashdot even bother with the summaries any more? They're outright wrong many times and just plain confusing and poorly written the rest. Either hire some better editors or just post the links to the original stories and be done with it. As it is, I'm about ready to delete my bookmark to this site and move on.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A book is a physical object, you can reference a book as long as you do not republish it in its entirety. The internet isn't a physical object, it's a collection of bytes arranged in a specific manner. It's that collection that makes it simple to take someone elses work and republish it, almost effortlessly.
The law has the ugly job of sorting out what constitutes copyright infringement -- republishing a website, perhaps? With the internet, it has become infinitely easier to republish works in their entirety, and hence the lawsuit. If they are guilty of anything, it is not of just 'referencing' a work, it is of taking that work, and republishing it without the authorization of its author. (heh, gotta love the wordplay)
To bring all of this to a point, it's as if I took your old book, put it into a book that talks about old stuff, and recopied everything, verbatim.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Seriously, if you don't want something to see something, THEN WHY DID YOU PUT IT ON THE INTERNET TO BEGIN WITH???
;)
but no worries, its all cool cause we just found an excuse to pull the lever on the american justice jackpot
This is a case where a plaintiff of an action (that they probably lost) is sueing opposing council for using the internet archive looking for old documentation that is used as evidence against its claims. In effect, they're claiming that because they had a robots.txt any page that might have been on the internet archive was there illegaly, and shouldn't have been used as evidence.
In effect, they're saying "we were wrong, we tried to destroy the evidence of our wrongdoing, but because the shredder jammed and you found the evidence anyway, you're abusing our copyright".
The court hearing their argument should thoroughly smack them. Perhaps they should be brought to justice for trying to destroy evidence (or instructing a third party to do so), surely that's illegal in these post-Enron days.
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
info@healthcareadvocates.com
Be gentle, they might be in the right after all.
It should be treated the same way trespassing for unfenced property is treated.
The case should be dismissed as it reproduces verbatim with attribution content that was published for public bot scraping.
Now what, will someone sue Yahoo ! or Google for caching pages or converting PDFs to HTML ? Or Coral Cache for unauthorized reproduction of websites ?.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
It's a constitutional guarantee, at least in the US.
The thinking runs that any wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence is outweighed by the wrongs that would result from abuses that would ensue if illegally obtained evidence was allowed to be used.
... if they lose this fight.
For example, 2600 Magazine's old web site containing a copy of the DeCSS source code is stored in the Archive. Could the Archive be held in violation of the DMCA for mirroring someone else's old site?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
""Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
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.
Didn't anyone ever tell you, law firms don't sue people, people sue people.
When will I be sued for remembering old stories and telling it to others ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_have_a_dream
KFG
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.
"We've lost our case based on evidence and will now be suing the organisation that provided the evidence for doing so".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
First and foremost, the existance of a robots.txt does not constitute a contract between the client (a web surfer/browser agent) and the server (the site hosting the content proper). Repeat that over and over. There is nothing stating that the existance of robots.txt on your server must be requested by my crawler or spider.
Its preferred, but not required. Even so, I am free to ignore it if I want, and parse whatever links I see fit to grab. If you make the content public and I want to read that content, I'm going to get it, whether you have robots.txt in place or not.
Secondly, has anyone taken the time to validate the robots.txt file found on the site in question? Note too that they just changed robots.txt on July 8th of this year. Did the previous version validate? Are they trying to rewrite history again? What did the old version look like?
If there is even so much as one error, robots/crawlers are free to ignore/parse/merge/break it as they see fit. It happens all the time, and even when robots.txt is perfectly valid, many robots and crawlers ignore it anyway (msnbot and Yahoo's crawlers are two of the worst offenders here).
But back to the first point, robots.txt is a guideline, not a rule, not a contract, and certainly not something that can be enforced. Does lack of a robots.txt file constitute the legal right to publically redistribute the content? Or store it for later review and retrieval? How do you know any of your former employees from 1996 haven't stored your entire website on floppy, one page at a time? Did they adhere to robots.txt? Did ANYONE adhere to robots.txt in 1996? It seems that there was evaluation of the Robots Exclusion Standard in 1996, but was everyone using it? Not likely.
Microsoft Internet Explorer will certainly store the entire website for "reading offline" if you ask it to do so when bookmarking it. They don't parse robots.txt to exclude pages that shouldn't be stored locally.
Its too bad that people need to try to erase history to prevail in litigation. This isn't George Orwell's 1984... well, at least not yet anyway.
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)
Huh ??? Is this really what they are saying:
1) That the Wayback Machine came and archived their site sometime in 1999.
2) Since then they have added a robots.txt file
3) Because they now have a robots.txt file previously archived material should no longer be available
If so that's complete nonsense.
But 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.
In so doing, the suit claims, the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumventing of "technological measures" designed to protect copyrighted materials. The suit further contends that among other violations, the firm violated copyright by gathering, storing and transmitting the archived pages as part of the earlier trademark litigation.
Wow that is stretching things!! Ive never read the DMCA but to claim that a robots.txt file (which isnt a legally binding mechanism by any means) added to the site after the pages had been indexed had been ignored by the wayback machine was a circumvention of their copyright and a violation of that act...well Id fully expect any judge to have a good laugh at this.
HOWEVER given how poor the US legal system is I wouldnt be suprised to hear that robots.txt gains legal status as a binding document for crawlers!!
I disagree. In North-Europe it's usual that even the illegally collected evidence counts. Abuse of power (police) is usually much more harsher a crime.
In Finland, there was one case where the police did an undercover operation to known drug seller. Too bad that at the time they didn't have rights to buy drugs undercover, resulting two officers charged and convicted of drug trading. Even more, the seller got an easier sentence because he was interpreted to be selling the drug out of request made by officers. Especially it was bad because it was planned. This in effect circumvents the "guilty man walking because of technicality" cases.
Besides, I see more problems with police violence in the US than I see problems with illegal evidence in the Europe. And no, I'm not trying to start a flame war.
?SYNTAX ERROR
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
I've read about 500 analogies on what electronic information "is like".
Every analogy is bad. We cannot equate electronic information with physical information of ages past. Every analogy just plain sucks.
The reason the information age has taken off is because of the ease of transmitting, storing and copying of electronic data. These methods weren't available fifty years ago, and weren't wide spread until about twenty years ago. Trying to stuff these concepts into one-hundred plus year old ways of thinking is just useless.
This does not mean we can't use older solutions to problems to guide us in the future. But, we need to stop shackling ourselves to old ways of thinking. The fundamental way we transmit thoughts and ideas have changed, our fundamental way of thinking about information needs to change as well.
Does this mean "all information is free"? No. But trying to treat electronic information like a book is useless. Web sites are put out to be publicly consumed. It is contradictory to say that someone cannot cache it for non-profit purposes. Trying to reuse the "creative" parts of the web site for commercial purposes should be prohibited.
Bottom line: Stop with the analogies. Start thinking fresh.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
And yet, that's how the Internet Archive tells people to remove previously archived material.
<mini-rant> And I'm really sick and tired of people that have absolutely no regard for how the law works copying material off the Internet and then expecting never to get sued for it, claiming some legally naive and ethically dubious justification. </mini-rant>
Seriously, we have this discussion every time Google or the Wayback Machine or whatever comes up. Putting material on the Internet does not give up your copyright on it, place it in the public domain, grant others the right to reproduce it any way they see fit, or otherwise work differently to copyright laws as they apply to all other media. There are necessarily certain implied rights, but arguing that actually ripping someone else's material and then making it publicly available after they've withdrawn it from their own site is a pretty big stretch to anyone without a vested interest.
Before anyone shoots back the inevitable responses about information wanting to be free, not controlling the flow, yada yada, please stop and think for a minute. A lot of the useful content on the web is made available by volunteers or companies who don't expect to profit from it immediately, but whose future business may be damaged if the information is taken and republished by others. Many of these people will just stop putting information on the web at all (see Slashdot discussions passim) if you abuse the access, and that doesn't benefit anyone.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And if you printed out the site, would they want to sue you for "reproducing" that site? Along the same lines, would someone want to sue you because you kept a book you bought 10 years ago and the author had written a new version? This all smacks of this "on demand" nonsense and self-destructing media and even shades of Orwell's 1984 where the Ministry of Truth modifies ancient history when it suits their purposes. This is all part of an attempt of corporations with the complicity of the legal establishment to place absolute control of all media in the hands of said corporations. Which all leads to the fact that it's time for the Congress to enact a Corporation Control Act that would finally put a leash on these rabid idiots.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
Anything posted on the web should automatically be in the public domain. The physical act of viewing a web page requires me to download its contents to my computer. That means the website in question is volunteering content for me to download (or at least view). Maybe if I'm a content provider, I have a right to be angry if someone uses that content to impersonate me, or whatever. But otherwise I must understand that I've just put the content on my readers computer- I have no real control at that point over what the reader does with that content.
You know, it's funny. The web used to be mostly about free organizations offering up content. Then companies figured out that people like the web, and so they started jumping on. Unfortunately though, they don't seem to want to play the web as it was meant to be played. The web was not designed to support copywrite controls, and I can't understand why companies constantly expect that it does.
The Internet Archive has received two DMCA exemptions from the US Copyright Office, but only for archiving copy protected software. I don't think they needed one to archive the web.
Yes, but the difference is that under copyright law, I can require that you not make copies of my site just so that you continue to come to my site to get updated versions of things.
I do this routinely with my technical papers exactly because I know they will be updated. They're usually available for people to view and read and link to, but I ask people not to make copies elsewhere and technically that "request" is enforceable under copyright law.
Now it's true that fair use allows some things to be copied for certain reasons. And, curiously, I think the need to copy for a lawsuit might stand up. But copying the entire of everything everywhere in anticipation of something being needed for a lawsuit sounds to me to be a questionable thing. To stretch the analogy one further: making a complete repository of photos of all store windows, almost as a workaround for the fact that those store windows were not directly accessible for use. That doesn't sound like fair use to me. One of the fair use criteria is about the totality of the work, and while it's undefined how that comes into play in each instance, it's clear that the amount of bulk matters here.
Personally, I was initially uncomfortable with the Internet Archive, and I continue to be of mixed feelings about it. I think it serves a huge historical interest. However, in the nearterm it has some ill effects that run counter to the copying/distribution/presentation laws of copyright and may need some correction.
I might think it reasonable if
The disturbing part is that legal term of copyright seems to continue to lengthen with time. I'm a big fan of copyright as a form of personal control for authors to get income from their works, but copyright must lapse after some part and it is already well exceeding what I think is reasonable in that regard, with the trend looking to extend indefinitely as rich copyright holders influence congress to extend every time, say, Mickey Mouse comes into jeopardy.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
If obtaining evidence illegally is acceptable, what ensures it was properly secured and documented? Why not just forge it?
Part of legal evidence gathering is ensuring you have a trail to prove it is valid.
Secondly what rights are trampled in the cause of getting that evidence?
By making illegally obtained evidence invalid you encourage proper behaviour. If the legal evidence is used to convict a killer the polic will get off with a slap on the wrists despite any crimes they may have committed.
If illegally obtaining evidence could cause that same killer to get off, you can bet the police would be extremely careful to ensure that the evidence is collected properly.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I demand that Slashdot will remove this comment after 3 days! Or else I'll see you in court!
From the article:
Frivolous Lawsuit? Hardly.
Excellent Spin-doctoring on McDonald's Part? Absolutely.
Yeah, right.
Legal decisions are often based on previous decisions, and at this point they are comparing "similar" (though not the same) situations in the physical world with those in the digital world.
In terms of public domain, visibility, and various other terms the analogies aren't bad. It's quite similar to patent cases... just because you do something on the internet doesn't make it unique (which makes for a lot of dumb patents), and really taking an electronic 'snapshot' of a publicly visible webpage shouldn't be any different than taking a picture+photocopy of a physical notice/bulletin/sign/etc in a publicly visible location.
If they'd published the same information on a sign in their front lawn... what's to seperate it from the e-Version other than the fact that one is paint and the other is bytes?
The IP law firm Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe is suing Akashic Inc. for 1.436e17000 violations of US and International Copyright Law.
Akashic Inc is accused of "rampant distribution of every single piece of copyrighted material concievable throughout the history and future of humankind."
Timothy Leary from Akashic Inc. commented that "I have no doubt that we will emerge triumhant in no less than 99.9% of all possible universes in which the case is currently active."
As far as I know, there hasn't been any definitive court case anywhere on the basic concept of Usenet archives. They at least have some kind of defence, because you inevitably expect Usenet messages to propagate beyond your control, and you expect that services providing Usenet feeds will charge money to their customers in exchange for relaying the information. IMHO, for Usenet archives it's more a question of whether permanent storage is a reasonable expectation for which permission is implied by posting, which can at least be argued reasonably either way (e.g., it usually isn't and it's common expectation that messages will disappear after a few days vs. the technical standards not saying anything about necessary expiration and considerations of increased cheap storage space at service providers compared to when Usenet was first running).
I'm pretty sure that at least one business that reproduced Usenet via the web and added those annoying automated keyword-linked ads on top of someone's posts has been screwed for it in court, though; IIRC, they were found to be publishing a derivative work without permission. I've come across at least one techie forum that was abusing many posts I've made to a programming newsgroup this way, which I did find inappropriate (they are generating ad revenue purely from distorting words I wrote, even advertising compilers in a post whose whole point was that you shouldn't write code depending on a specific compiler!), so I don't have much sympathy. If anyone can remember the case that established this one, I'd appreciate a reference.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The Internet Archive is the worst copyright infringement in the history of mankind. It's about time someone stops them. (Don't you dare mod me as troll, flamebait or funny! I'm dead serious.)
Not exactly the kind of people you want to be defending. The fact that copyright law can be used this way suggests it is broken. The fact that it was created before our modern information economy was formed also suggests it is broken and in need of revision.
Credibility is not something you can easily steal, and the people who "get there first" tend to get the lion's share of credibility, even when competing against companies much larger than themselves.So your cheap shot about how people on Slashdot have nothing to lose is just that, a cheap shot with no substance or truth. We're not saying that copyright laws need to be entirely abolished, but they do need to be updated to reflect our modern society and information infrastructure. The fact that we're compelled to lay unenforceable law after unenforceable law down on top of copyright law in a vain attempt to keep it afloat in its current state should be evidence enough that things need to change.
Excuse me? What? A public website is by its very nature meant to be redistributed. It is replicated on millions of machines per day for many different purposes. If you do not agree to at least some redistribution for your website, then take it offline because it doesn't work without redistribution.Sue the caching proxy servers! Sue people who use internet cache! Sue Proximitron users! Sue link-of-the-day sites because they helped people replicate the data. Wait, why not just sue everyone online, because they were party to the crime by using the same routers!
Nice, avoiding his point entirely. Part of copyright law is the intent with which you distribute it. This helps prevent entrapment scenarios. If you place a public site on the internet, your intent is to have it treated like a public site. This means it will be crawled by search engines, cached by proxies, linked to by interested users, downloaded for personal offline browsing, pre-cached by Earthlink and AOL services, and archived by the wayback machine.This is the cost of doing business on the internet. This is how it works, and how it's going to continue to work. If you are not willing to express this intent with your website, take it down now.
Bear in mind that the article is about a large insurance corporation trying to deny benefits to a group of people, using copyright law as a club to beat evidence into inadmissibility. We're not talking about chinese knockoffs ruining a poor independent artist. We're talking about Yet Another Way Out for corporate America's scumbags.If copyright law allows this, then we need to tear it down and fix it, because I'm not willing to pay such a stiff price for a basic kind of protection that I probably can't afford to fight in court anyways.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I respectfully disagree.
The wrongs that would ensue if illegally obtained evidence is allowed to be used are the same as the wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence.
If by "the wrongs that are created by illegally obtained evidence" you mean the results of a crime (say, the wrong created by a handgun fired at the cashier of a liquor store during the course of an armed robbery, resulting in the cashier's death); then I would argue that the wrongs are not the same at all.
The idea of not allowing illegally obtained evidence to be used in a criminal trial is to protect 'The People' from abuses by 'The State'. Using evidence that has been illegally obtained may result in the conviction of a guilty person, except that doing so is (usually) found to be a violation of an U.S. citizen's right "...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures".
I believe the theory is that if the police were regularly permitted to use illegally obtained evidence in a trial, it would moot the Fourth Amendment protections of the Constitution, resulting in something awfully similar to a police state. Think of this: if a police officer knows that any "evidince" they find during the course of an investigation will be permitted in a trial, then there is no check upon their power to search and seize (illegal searches are often the reason why evidence is suppressed). If an officer knows they don't need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a search, what's to stop them from randomly searching ANY person, place, or thing, at ANY time, for ANY reason (under the guise of 'conducting an investigation', of course)?
An innocent person may feel they have nothing to hide, but do you really want the police tossing your home at 3AM because you fit the description of somebody who committed a crime recently? What if that description was merely "black male"? What if you happen to be a black male, and the cops go digging through your home looking for a firearm and find your marijuana stash instead? Oops, now you're gonna go to jail for drug charges, and it doesn't even matter that you were nowhere near that liquor store when it was robbed. The sort of damage that such a system would do to our freedoms is far worse than the damage done to the prosecutor's case by suppressing evidence of a murder/armed robbery that had been illegally obtained.
Furthermore, what if the police don't find anything during the search of your house, but decide that they need a conviction, so they simply plant evidence instead? Things like warrants and chain of evidence are designed to prevent such abuses, but if police do not have to follow those procedures, you can kiss that notion goodbye.
If that's true, we had all better be careful not to visit *too* many pages on a given website during a given day. Either that or make sure that our web browser is set to immediately flush all downloaded content once it has been rendered.
The argument being made is that copyright is being violated, but the way the archive works might well be considered fair use, since the *only* reason it exists is for archival purposes. If having a copy of website content is illegal, in and of itself, then everyone who uses a web browser (unless they're running knoppix or something that doesn't store anything to the HD) is just as guilty as the Internet Archive.
I hereby rescind your permission to copy any of my posts, which means that if you're reading this, you're in violation of copyright law.
Okay, I now release my copyrighted work officially into the public domain. You're safe now.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Spider: Hi, I'm an Internet Spider, may I access this page?
RT: No, no, one thousand and twenty-four times NO! I will not give this page to a spider.
Spider: Okay. How about this other page?
If this were the case, then the only way of bypassing this mechnism -- and one that would violate the sprirt (IMHO), if not the letter (IANAL), of the DCMA would be for your Spider to not identify itself as a spider. Then it would be trying to trick an Access Control Mechnism.
BTW, it's my on opinion that once you publish a page on the Internet for public viewing, you cannot complain if they've Time-Shifted that viewing to a later point by recording -- ur, saving -- it on recordable media. Seems to me that the plantifs are totally wrong, got caught at it by their own web-postings, and are now trying to kill the messenger.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In the United States, putting any creative work into a fixed tangible form automatically confers the protection of copyright, effective from that moment. No notice or registration is required.
That's simply not true. You have to be able to prove that you created it first, and if you want the right to be the sole receiver of royalties from your work, you have to register it with the copyright office. This isn't free, either.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Archive.org has always had a good policy to removing data on request.
They have an automatic version that allows use of robots.txt, when forbidden to crawl they go back and make the other, older versions unavailable as well. (It only works when the re-crawl happens, though I think you can initate it by going to the site.)
Furthermore, additional requests can be made via email to remove content. The only "damage" here is that the wrong (in their opinion) law firm got ahold of the data before they could do that.
The company suing, broke the law, got sued, got fucked, and now wants to sue to recover money due to them breaking the law and getting busted for it by going after archive.org that provided evidence in the original lawsuit. Sorry guys, you got fucked when you first stole trademarked stuff of someone elses web site. The rest of it is just sour apples. They should be charged with intimidating a witness and put in pound me in the ass federal prison for it. It's racketteering like that that gives lawyers such a bad name.
Had they any brains, they would have employed a geek to go seek out these cached sources and remove them the first time around.
AND the company suing the original offending company, should have used a simple entry in their HOSTS file to keep from accidentally causing requests to go to the original web server, that's simple data forensics.
Let me tell you a story about my week in mid September, 2001. After wasting tons of time reading news I got a desparate call from a certain client (soon to be rather). Their web host was in the towers, and both server farms were demolished, along with all the backup tapes. Their site was gone. AND due to other complications they were losing customers left and right.
I used Archive.org, Google cache and a few bits they had to reassemble the web site and get it back on line. In this case, un-pre-approved caching was critical in keeping this company from going out of business.
There 1,000s of other systems that cache data and make it available later, Inktomi, Akami, corporate networks, those "high speed dial-up" things, my friggin open source firewall does that (Squid?). It's simply stupid to sue archive.org for that. Caching is part of the web, get fucking used to it.
It's the webmasters damn job to know or learn all about this stuff (including caching). Slapping HTML up on some server is not the end of web managment. There's a whole lot more to it.
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.
I know you're all going to find this shocking, but it looks like the
1. Healthcare Associates of Philly sues Health Advocate. The law firm representing the plaintiff is McCarter & English. The defendant's is Harding et al.
2. Healthcare Assoc. modifies robots.txt to tell IA not to allow access to older versions of their site. 3. Harding et al. manages to get the IA to give them a peek anyway*.
4. Healthcare Assoc. sees "rapid fire" requests from Harding in their logs, and a few times the IA slipped up and granted access anyway.
5. Healthcare Assoc. sues Harding et al. and the IA.
*My guess is that the IA checks the current robots.txt everytime an archived page is accessed. If the server doesn't respond quickly enough, the assume it's OK to give access to the archived files. Harding et al. might have realized this and requested the pages over and over in rapid succession to slow down Healthcare Assoc.'s servers enough to trick IA into thinking they're not responding. This is all just my speculation, so take it with a grain of salt.
(Sorry for the crappiness of the diagram. Apparently Slashdot is more concerned with preventing 13-year-olds from posting ASCII art versions of gotse man that will be modded down to -1 in 2 seconds than it is with allowing people to make diagrams to illustrate something. And why the eff doesn't the "ecode" tag work properly?)
You do realize that this is patently incorrect?
Pardon me if this sounds pedantic, but tort law is so misunderstood that I'd like the opportunity to correct this post.
In Common Law countries, all people have a duty to act as would a reasonably prudent person in the same or similar circumstances. A person is negligent if they breach that duty and cause injury to another.
In other words, the city is negligent if it fails to repair a sidewalk that a reasonably prudent person would have repaired. In situations where a party lacks notice of a defect, the same analysis applies: should a reasonably prudent person responsible for the maintenance of a sidewalk have been aware of the defect.
Here's an example: 10 minutes ago, NYC experienced a minor, highly localized earthquake that fractured the sidewalk outside my apartment. 7 minutes ago, I realized I was out of milk. 4 minutes ago, I stepped out of the building, tripped on the damaged sidewalk, and broke my leg in 12 places.
A reasonably prudent city probably wouldn't be able to repair the damage in the six minutes between earthquake and injury. Probably, the city government wouldn't even be aware of it by then. Thus, the city couldn't be negligent.
A more likely explanation is that the law firms are videotaping the sidewalks and sending them to the city government to put them on notice of serious flaws in the sidewalk. Then they can argue that the city was on notice of the defects and failed to act reasonably by not repairing the damage.
But negligence does not require evidence of willful conduct. Negligence is merely a failure to act as a reasonably prudent person under the circumstances.
--AC
Now that you've modded the parent down, you should mod me down too.
That's true, now. There was a time that a specific act had to be shown, and the person specified. Over a hundred years ago, a man was injured when a loose barrel came flying out of a brewery and hit him. He sued for negligence, and won, even though nobody could be shown to have caused it. This was because the incident was so outrageous that there was no possible explanation without assuming negligence, and it established a new legal priciple: res ipse loquitur, the act speaks for itself.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
From the FA (emphasis mine):
I'm fairly certain that the Internet Archive has no control over access to Healthcare Advocates own webserver(s). I'm also fairly certain that the Internet Archive would not log access to archived web content back to the "Web logs at Healthcare Advocates". So someone at Healthcare Advocates or its legal firm is really, really grasping at nonexistent straws here, or just plain stupid/ignorant. Suing the Internet Archive because Healthcare Advocates' own webserver(s) served up outdated content that they themselves left accessible? (robots.txt is no substitute for simply removing the old files from the webserver(s)' document tree or otherwise restricting access at the server side.)
Hopefully sanity prevails and this lawsuit is dropped. Either that or Healthcare Advocates and/or its legal representation is made a laughingstock in the courtroom.
IANAL, but... actually, it is. Since 1978, copyright has been granted automatically on the creation of the work, with registration required only to exercise certain legal options such as recovering statutory damages. See Title 17 USC Chapter 3, Section 302 (a) for this, and Chapter 4, Sections 411 and 412 for the limitation on what you can do without registering. The exclusive rights granted by copyright (Chapter 1, Section 106) remain in effect regardless of registration.
| That's akin to advocating free speech, even if it means shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre
The correct quote is "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." and it has absolutely nothing to do with the issues at play in this case. The statement is a limitation where it endangers public health and or safety, and I dont think anyone would apply those standards to this case. Similarly, Defamation has no relation to this case, and Breach of Contract in the form of robots.txt is already a bone of contention in the case.
I'm not having this discussion about free speech. I'm having this discussion about the scope of current copyright arguments. I'm not arguing that this suit is trying to muzzle the IA in violation of the first ammendment. That would be a flawed argument anyway - the IA is an organization, not an individual, and thus not subject to constitutional protection in most cases (including this one). I'm arguing that the value proposition of copyright does not extend to preventing organizations like the IA from documenting the state and history of any publicly accessible website. It is a documentarian, and educational role, and as such, is every bit as appropriate as the library system.
The Internet Archive is, in essence, cataloging the evolution of one of the most significant cultural phenomenons of the last century. That IS of tremendous historical significance - most especially because 80% of the content that is there now will be lost forever within the next year if they DONT do it.
The internet is evolving at a breakneck pace. As new business models, new buisnesses, new display models, new UI elements and new languages crop up, older sites are redesigned, replaced or relegated to non-existence by darwinian market forces. What is there now bears little resemblance to what was there a year ago, and likely little resemblance to what will be there a year from now. This evolution is of tremendous social, scientific and cultural significance.
Do I believe that documenting this growth and evolution trumps the overextended copyright argument presented by the plaintiff in this case? Yes, I do. The plaintiff had no reasonable expectation of privacy where the public website was concerned. The information was placed in what amounts to a public space, with no access controls and no barriers to public navigation. To assert then, that the IA was acting inapproriately to document the state of the public portion of that site is patently absurd.
Now, to your other points...
We aren't discussing Joe User's website, we are discussing a website developed and deployed by a corporation at some expense with the express purpose of giving them a 'web presence'. Many jurisdictions will now permit the argument of publication where an agency has spent time and money to make information available to an audience. The expense and resources expended to make it available to the public presuppose an intent and desire that it be seen and consumed by the public. Further, the case in question references the DMCA, and specifically, a means to bypass security measures to prevent copying. That clause of the DMCA (and arguably the whole the whole law) applies _specifically_ to published media.
Regardless, flyers distributed in a parking lot or on a public bulletin board also carry all of the assumptions needed to carry the rest of my argument. The 'provider' of such information has no control over the future use or reference to those fliers in an educational, historical or editorial context.
Again, free speech is only a peripheral issue here. Fair use doctrine is as much, or more a limitation of copyright as it is a defense of the first ammendent. While first ammendment protections have been used to DEFEND fair use in the past, it does not necessarily follow that all questions relating to fair use are also first ammendment challenges. At question here is the IA's right to
I've been wondering if the issue isn't simpler than all of this legal wrangling? What I mean is that, whatever has happened all throughout history, we only have 1) evidence of things through artifacts, interpreted by those who find and study them, and 2) the written word, by those who research, then try to wrap up "facts" in a coherant package.
Technology such as the internet archive now exists to automatically, systematically, and rather thoroughly store very specific artifacts (old web pages). These artifacts happen to also be the written word. The complication is that much of that written word (that the legal system and corporations care about) is propaganda which, by its very nature, is not 100% true. What is true from a historical perspective, though, is that it existed as a part of the Internet/WWW which, in turn, is a huge part of our society and culture.
So do we view it in the context of an accurate historical representation of a body of knowledge that existed at a given snapshot of time, which is a decent encapsulated version of "truth," which is theoretically what a good justice system should be rooted in? Or, do we blatantly use outmoded, weasel-ish legal wranglings to suppress what is, indeed, truth that is relevant to deciding a given court case?
If we choose the latter, what does that say about the integrity of our justice system?