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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.
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.
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.
""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."
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".
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Having a public website is implicitly allowing anyone to read/view what you've made available.
But NOT to redistribute it.
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
Oddly, the Internet Archive honours robots.txt, so if you don't want people to surf your archive, you can just post their robots.txt file and it will block everything, even into the past.
I would say that caching and archiving are so well understood to be part of the Internet that posting a web page and not expecting it to be archived or spidered is absurd. In other words, by posting their site to the web without a robots.txt, they knowingly published it in a medium which contains facilities for archiving and later redistribution.
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. :)
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
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.
Actually, while they do not give up any copyright, there are a number of explicitly stated, legal uses of copyrighted materials and there is a great deal of public benefit to enumerating a few more of them. Can you honestly argue it is not in the public's best interest that a historical archive of the internet exists, for educational reasons if no other? This case should be a poster child for just such legislation. A company published something, lied about it, and are now suing the people who made a copy and proved their guilt. Are you saying it is in the best interests of society that copyrights be used as tool to promote lies and censorship?
Copyright is supposed to be about one thing and one thing only, promoting science and arts. That is the only constitutional provision for its existence. If someone is copying legally obtained works into an archive for educational, historical, or non-profit uses then they are almost invariably helping to promote science and arts, and anyone trying to stop them is up to no good.
As to the letter of the law (which is probably unconstitutional although it is impossible to prove that) you're right. The internet archive is screwed in the U.S. and many other countries. They tried to do what copyright law originally required of copyright holders and the library of congress. If a work is to copyrighted then ethically it needs to be available. That is the whole point of copyright. According to the letter of the law it is probably illegal for me to print out the receipt some e-businesses display when I buy something online. The law needs to be fixed.
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.
What? How does this limiting of the rights of others encourage them to distribute the material? They, like the majority of copyright holders these days, don't want the work to be available at all. It does not encourage them to publish it, it just gives them a way to prevent works from being distributed.
The archive is in trouble not because the violated the intention of copyright. They, in fact, are trying to uphold the very principals upon which it is founded. Unfortunately, the laws have been changed by the corrupt and greedy to create a situation where copyright does exactly the opposite of its original purpose. This is a perfect example of copyright laws that have been rewritten being used to hold back progress and remove works from public availability. It is unethical and sickening and your implication that a businesses financial considerations should trump both the rights of our descendants to have access to our works and that they trump the the ability to find and present the truth in the courts... well it makes me want to vomit. Go to hell.