Link Rot and the US Supreme Court

necro81 writes "Hyperlinks are not forever. Link rot occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made. Even permalinks aren't necessarily permanent if a domain goes silent or switches ownership. According to new research from Harvard Law, some 49% of hyperlinks in Supreme Court documents no longer point to the correct original content. A second study on link rot from Yale stresses that for the Court footnotes, citations, parenthetical asides, and historical context mean as much as the text of an opinion itself, which makes link rot a threat to future scholarship."

Comments

404 Not Found

[themushroom]

Which is not what you want to see in, say, an Apple verses Samsung style case where "previous art" and earlier applications are all that separate you from being successfully sued into the Stone Age.

Re:404 Not Found

[admiralh]

Some of them, yes.

Consider that the Constitution was the *second* attempt to unite the former colonies, since the Articles of Confederation was seen as being way out of balance, with the States having way too much power w.r.t. the Federal Government.

And remember that the Declaration of Independence was the rhetorical culmination of the battle that started when Parliament wanted the colonists to pay the costs of the French and Indian War, and the rich New England colonists refused.

Re:Well that's easily remedied

[Frojack123]

They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.

Interesting concept, but Wayback is not always complete.

Perhaps the court should create an exemption to copyright, that allows the creation an internal copy (perhaps in image or pdf format) of the page for anti-link-rot protection.

I'm sure with clever wording they can manage to restrict this to lawyers and court proceedings, however:
I could make the case that it should apply universally.

After all, If you ever put up a page publicly on the net to content you were the rightful owner of, you have declared that version of that page to be a public document, and anyone should have the ability to make a static Image of that document. There are all sorts of copyright corner cases involved, but it is really no different than publishing your screed in the New York times or your local paper. There is no way to unpublish it, and no way to prevent it being archived.