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

And this is a big deal why?

[Shadow of Eternity]

Peaple go to the library and dig through hundreds of old newspapers and records, whats the big deal with using wayback for websites?

Re:And this is a big deal why?

[TTK Ciar]

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

Re:And this is a big deal why?

[Kenja]

Your right! We must put a stop to this movable type menace before the serfs use it to spread anti authoritarian pamplets!

Not everything is archived ....

[awacs]

... WBM respects the site's decision to not allow archiving. Unfortunately, those sites who might be the most interesting know that, and know that they can block archiving.

Re:Not everything is archived ....

[pilgrim23]

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.

Employers are using Google too

[October_30th]

Maybe this is a bit off-topic, but employers are also known to use Google and web archives to check up on the past of a potential employee. So be careful what kind of statements you make on the net using your real name.

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

It also got wayback sued.

[Peyna]

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=112124551185 5

Infinite Loop

[kensai]

If Google cached pages from the WBM and the WBM archived Google cached pages, wouldn't that cause an infinite loop. j/k

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.

Hey Mr. Peabody!

[DigitalReverend]

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.

But see, they signed a peice of paper

[Mr Guy]

In the article, it mentions one of the archive's technicians signing an affidavit saying they think it's a true archive. No one would ever lie about that for a big corporate payout.

Re:In Contrast to

[fritter]

OMG D00D you're totally right! Some lawyers argue for one thing, while others argue for another! I just heard about this case the other week where this lawyer made a case that some guy was guilty of murder, but another lawyer was arguing the EXACT SAME GUY was innocent! I cannot believe they tried to have it both ways! Unlike every other profession in the world, where everyone thinks exactly alike!

Seriously, how did this get modded "Interesting"?

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

Playboy

[floppy ears]

Playboy checks Wayback to look for infringers of its trademark bunny or other images.

So they're basically just sitting around surfing porn too, eh?

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

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