Wayback Archives as a Law Tool

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The Wayback Machine's internet archive and Google's cached pages are becoming indispensable tools for some lawyers, especially specialists in intellectual-property law. Dell has used copies of expired websites to get the domain name DellComputersSuck.com transferred to it, the Wall Street Journal reports. EchoStar used Wayback in a case against a Polish TV company. Playboy checks Wayback to look for infringers of its trademark bunny or other images. And Wayback was even used to discredit a witness and reach a mistrial in a Canada murder case."

Comments

Text (Yes) Images (not always)

[bigwavejas]

WBM works great for pulling up historical text content, but I've noticed it tends to be hit-and-miss with images. Try pulling up a website and chances are you'll see broken image links.

Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always)

[el_gordo101]

That's because they don't save the image files, as far as I can tell. The images actually point back to the site that was archived through some sort of re-direct on the WBM site. If the images files no longer exist on the original site, they will not display on the WBM archived page.

Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always)

[el_gordo101]

Interesting. Our sites date back to 1999. The images files from the older versions of sites do not show up, as these files were deleted long ago. The newer versions that use the images files that are still resident in our /images directory work fine. I am not sure how they handle images.

One easy workaround...

[DJ Rubbie]

$ cat robots.txt
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

My site is not archived there, problem solved.

(Of course, if another of these service pops up...)

So perhaps censoring the archive is wrong? Signed?

[expro]

Destroying evidence? If I don't want to be caught and ask for older web pages to be removed, that may contain incriminating evidence such as illegal copies of things or illegal links, is this different from a request by any other copyright holder to have his pages removed, and can it be punished? What are the archives retention policies, and have legal orders been served to prevent destruction of evidence?

What would be even better would be if the archives digitally signed their archives and kept signatures even of those things that had been asked to remove so that the validity of a copy could be established if made for legal purposes (SCO, Scientologists, and other things come to mind) even if later censored.

Re:Employers are using Google too

[op12]

It's like that CNN article (I think it was posted here) from a few days back:

Bloggers learn the price of telling too much

robots.txt

[Cyburbia]

Even if the Wayback Machine archived your site, adding an appropriate robots.txt file to your Web site's root directory will make _all_ previous archives inaccessible to the public. I discovered this by accident, after I blocked the Wayback Machine robot by accident in an attempt to control malicious spiders. After I modified robots.txt, all the old archives reappeared after a few weeks.

I used the Wayback machine to grab thousands of messages from an old WWWBoard-based message board that I ran, for eventual conversion to vBulletin. Some years, the Wayback Machine crawled every month; others it didn't even visit. Probably 80% of the messages that were posted before 2000 are lost to the ether of cyberspace. Guess you can't expect it to archive everything.

Old Drivers

[TheSeventh]

I was able to use the wbm last year to find some old device drivers for a no-name motherboard I had from '97. The company went out of business, and their remaining stockpiles were bought by some other Chinese company, but the wbm actually had old copies of the drivers, and even a bios update for the board. Now, I always check there when I am having a hard time finding stuff that I knew used to be around.

/bq

Re:School

[LnxAddct]

Its been a bit since I was in highschool and had to get around filters, but the most sure fire way is to run an ssh server at home on a port that your school's firewall lets through (most let 22, but to be less suspicious choose like 25 or 443 or something) and then carry putty around on a pen drive. Whenever you need unrestricted access, pop open putty, connect to your server and create a dynamic tunnel, on that pen drive you can also have firefox and have a socks proxy set up to use port like 1080 or whatever port you choose for a dynamic proxy. There you go, unlimited, encrypted surfing all bypassing your school's filters and beening tunneled through your house. This all assumes that your school's firewall doesn't block based on protocol, but rather ports.
Regards,
Steve

If only there was a Firefox extension

[Rurik]

Google Caching and Wayback lookups. You could easily look URLs up by right-clicking on them.

Oh, wait, there is one.

/shameful plug

disclaimer

[TTK Ciar]

I do not speak for The Archive. The above post should not be considered to reflect the official position of The Archive. It is purely my own personal opinion, and it was uttered under the influence of painkillers (I had my wisdom teeth yanked out of my jaw Wednesday, qv my Slashdot journal entry). Else I probably would have refrained -- talking about this at all while there's a court case pending was probably a really stupid idea, and I (usually) know better.

-- TTK

Re:What about copyrights?

[Ngwenya]

OK, you may look at WBM as a library, but IS it?

Yes. It really is. It's a registered member of the American Library Association. Details on http://www.archive.org/about/about.php

It's an honest to God library, which also means that Section 108 of the USC on Copyright applies. Public libraries in the US (and here in the UK) have some pertinent exemptions to the copyright restrictions that bind us mere mortals.

--Ng