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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."
A few weeks ago /. had a bit on an Internet Archive that got sued for having material that was ordered withdrawn by a court. How can they have things both ways? I think I'm begining to understand why law school is so hard, you have to learn to think like a lawyer, which is like learning to type with your nose.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=112124551185 5
What?
Stand back Sherman as we set the dials on the wayback machine to 1845....
Seriously, theres been many times I would want to kiss the person running wayback. I lost my home a few years back and had several websites that I lost because I hosted out of my house. I have been able to rebuild, or come fairly close to duplicating those original sites.
As for lawyers, if there wasn't somebody already archiving all these sights, they'd get someone to do it for them and then it would not be accessible to the public. I guess we need to take the good with the bad on this.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Sometimes being able to see in the past is more valuable than being able to see in the future. It makes sense for lawyers to try to find ways to look back, for evidence and proof can only be found in the past.
If you have evidence, you can prove your claims. If you can prove your claims, you win a dispute. If you win the dispute in favor of your client, that makes you one good lawyer.
Technology ramblings : Simple is Beautiful
In the future what will stop someone or some entity from falsifying information knowing that the legal system will use this.
,what if she had WBM's bot goto a "nice" page and not the real site that case could have gone differently.
How can the info in wayback.org or google be trusted ? You can make redirect pages based on googlebot or wayback that have nothing to do with what is really on the site.
In the article it is mentioned that vodaphone.com was taken by a squatter and they used wayback to show that her intentions were "intended to misleadingly attract consumers"
I think that if someone wants to they can plan ahead and use this in a nefarious fashion.
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
Another point of note: Net Nanny and Surf Watch or other such tools blcok the main sites. they do NOT block the WBM archive of goatse.cx or the like. AND THAT IS A GOOD THING!!!
Example:
www.copstalk.com used to be the home page for a maker of Macintosh to PC via Appletalk cross platform communications tools. They were later bought out. If you wish to look at documentation on their older products, go to the WBM. www.copstalk.com these days IS A PORN SITE.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
For one its not quite as verifiable. Who is to say, for example, that someone with access to the Wayback servers couldn't put their own content and dates on there, and then use that as "evidence" for some suit?
I don't know how (if?) its regulated, any insights into this?
I work at The Archive. There are only two people, three at most, with the expertise and access to pull something like this off, and if someone tried Brad would almost definitely notice. There are checks in place to detect bitrot in the web archive, and altering older ARCs to include new information would be detected as bitrot and flagged for closer attention. They would then be compared against the copies in our sister organization's data cluster in Europe, and possibly also compared against the copies in the datacenter in Egypt.
To make it work, you'd pretty much have to get Brad to play along, and he is fanatical about the integrity of the web data. I don't think you could pay him enough to do it, and he doesn't have any sons or daughters you could kidnap for blackmail.
How one would go about demonstrating all of this in court, though, I do not know. IANAL.
-- TTK
TODO: Insert witty sig
What about the HTTP/1.1 header "Cache-Control: no-store"? Although the rfc description of what it does seems rather confusing to me.
I imagine if you searched for sites talking about 9-11 pre-9-11-2001 you'd find some interesting things. Post 9-11 there were a zillion references, but pre-9-11 there couldn't have been that many.
Same with the london bomings, no?
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Peaple go to the library and dig through hundreds of old newspapers and records, whats the big deal with using wayback for websites?
Well, copyright infringement for one. Wayback's copyright infringement does lead to damages to some people.
Lets say person A posted copyrighted info on your web site. You didn't know it was copyrighted at the time. Person B tells you that it is and you pull the content. Copyright owner (C) later sues your ass since they found it on the WBM.
It's copyright infringement, whether or not you know the material is copyrighted, or have reason to know.
Copyright law does provide for reduced penalties in the case where the "infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright."
So, the law has in essence created a duty to users of documents to determine if they are copyrighted prior to distributing.
What?
And?
That the priginal point isn't a problem was my point - that it was sarcasm is irrelevant to what was expressed.
Determining who to believe is what courts do. The technician swears under oath that the archive supplied hasn't been tampered with. The other side can argue the testimony is untrustworthy or that the technician can't know. It's no different than a doctor saying "yes those X-rays are of the person in question and were taken on this date".
Or a police officer saying "He ran a red light".
Yes it's not foolproof. People can lie. People can be paid off. But it's the system as it stands - and the opposing side gets a chance to discredit the person making the claims and also to provide evidence that contradicts the claims.
Here's what happens, I think: 1) At first, no reference to Wayback machine in robots.txt. Site is spidered and the archive placed on line. 2) Add Wayback Machine to robots.txt. The site is no longer spidered, and old archives are hidden from public view. 3) Remove Wayback Machine from robots.txt again. Spidering resumes, and all the old archives of the site reappear. However, there is no archive of your site from the time robots.txt was up; remember, it wasn't spidered then.