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Wayback Archives as a Law Tool

Posted by Zonk on from the time-travel-is-fun dept.

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."

2 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. One easy workaround... by DJ+Rubbie · · Score: 5, Informative

    $ 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...)

    --
    Please direct all bug reports to /dev/null
  2. Re:What about copyrights? by Ngwenya · · Score: 5, Informative

    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