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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occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made.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."
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.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.
Should documents then start including snapshots of the site (Wayback Machine-style) in document appendices? It's more work, sure, but it seems to be an obvious solution.
Link rot could be "a threat to future scholarship"? WHO SAID TRAINING FEWER LAWYERS WAS A BAD THING? I just don't see the problem.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Good thing the NSA has it all backed up!
This has been a well known problem for at least a couple of decades. Google had their famous cache that was famous for saving peoples hides or embarrassing peoples mistakes. The people that run the Wayback machine have been fighting this problem for many, many years.
Their is a natural resistance to being able to preserve content as it was at the time. People, companies and governments like to make revisionist history and forget that certain things ever happened or change them after the fact. Specialized companies help with reputation management in ensuring that such things disappear for good.
It's a problem from tech support documentation that disappears to finding old employers that have changed their name and moved location. The only way to resolve the issue is to be able to preserve the content as it was for posterity. Always assume your links will vanish and turn your need pages into archive files. If you really want to do something about it donate to the Internet Archive.
For fuck's sake, this is one reason why PURLs exist. The trainwreck that is a constant string of dynamic URLs *printed* out in court opinions is an example of shameful institutional incompetence, regardless of whether it's willful ignorance or just plain ignorance.
What is required to address this is an official government domain that hosts static screencaptures of web pages, provides PURLs to point to them, and ideally uses a URL-shortening function like goo.go or bit.ly.
Then, instead of including a long, difficult-to-retype URL in the opinion, the short, easy-to-type PURL appears in the opinion. The supplemental info for the citation includes things like original URL and date accessed, and the given PURL will point to the material in question.
Opposed to this idea will be copyright owners who fear that court opinions will eliminate their revenues by providing free access to material they usually charge for. Because this kind of opposition is easy to use to score political points (big government! wasting taxpayer dollars!! eminent domain of the little guy's copyrighted material!!!), to make money, getting to this obvious solution will be long delayed. When it is ultimately decided upon, it will be thousands of times more expensive than need be, take three times as long to roll out, will be created using shoddy technology that will break very quickly, and be used as yet another example of government failure.
Everything goes on one massive drive, and you grep keywords. Bring along a donut and coffee - it may be a while!
PURLs and the like assume that there's going to be someone around to maintain the content, and maintain the linkage to the content.
If a document is officially 'published' and given some sort of persistant ID (eg, DOI, ARK, Handle, whatever), then citing documents *should* use those over URLs.
If however, you're just citing an example that's just some web site on the internet ... then you're SOL. They have no reason to never change their materials, keep a given version around 'til the end of time, or inform you if it's been moved elsewhere.
eg, say that there's a complaint about some process, they cite Montgomery Ward's website as an example where it was done previously ... of course, the company doesn't exist any more. This is much different than someone locking up an article from a paywall -- they *want* you to find the item, so they can then try to get $30 or whatever out of you.
(of course, I've just spent the last week talking about all of these issues, between meetings of DataCite, Research Data Alliance and Force 11)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This should be a mission of the Library of Congress - to archive everything ever used by the government (including court cases), be it on the Internet or not.
While they're at it, they can probably archive nearly everything else.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
I would like to see participation in the memento project/stable URIs (http://mementoweb.org) become considered as a fundamental element of being considered "a journalist", part of the media, etc., in order to get the protections of that status. The lack of a consistent history in the web based media is harmful, and more than one massive corporation has used the "fluidity" of the web and hyperlinks to be more than fluid with the truth.
http://www.metafilter.com/98913/Ancestors-we-will-never-know-presage-feelings-we-can-never-have-now-go-forth-and-time-travel-on-the-web
Oh, and yeah, for e-laws and the presentation of findings of governmental groups and organizations, and those receiving governmentally recognized status as candidates of recognized parties with web presences... mandate that asap, and I will hug the government!
Transparency is only as good as your hyperlink protection and preservation plan.
dupe
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/122210/implications-of-broken-links
The only link that matters still works.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html
Too bad they can't reference this one more.
This is because the current IP protocols are Dumb when it comes to data. I mean that with a capital D. Not that the designers are dumb, but the protocol itself is just dumb, in that it knows nothing about the data.
We suffer from the fact that IPv4 and IPv6 do not have store and forward. Instead of / in addition to endpoint IDs, all the routers need to have a large cache for versioned content. You can still have your frackin' unversioned uncacheable content, however we need a more permanent store and forward service. This will reduce bandwidth consumption, and is essential for bringing the Internet to space it's part of the Interstellar DTN (delay tolerant network).
Imagine the entire Internet as a hybrid between a decentralized distributed file store, and the current IP stack. Instead of requesting an endpoint we could request the data hash. A distributed hash table could serve the content from within the Internet. ISPs can vastly decrease bandwidth by increasing their cache duplication size (as we have currently), but when a cache miss happens it could be served by another cache in the distributed hash table on up the chain to the origin. "What about updates to documents? My cached pages!" Fools, the doc will have a different hash. We could actually SOLVE issues whereby resource names must be changed by simply requesting them based on their internal content hashes. Additionally, we can fix the issue of mixed secure / insecure content while we're at it. A resource referenced inside a secure document can include THE HASH ID of the resource. Thus, you know the insecure and cacheable content you're pulling in is unmodified...
Nope, we can't have nice things because you fuckers regard the old farts who designed the current antiquated systems as if they were gods, even though store and forward works beautifully for packet radio. (Hint: The FCC disallows any use of store and forward by unlicensed civilians.) Otherwise we could have a decentralized unsnoopable high-speed (largely) wireless Internet that grows organically with demand with little or no fees (everyone's a node hosting data, buy a box once and you're done).
The main barriers to solving the problem are ISP greed, draconian copyright laws, and desire for a surveillance state.
Note, this WILL all happen eventually anyway, you idiots are just too foolish to realize it, so it'll turn out to be a cluster fuck like "The Web" is now because the end result will be evolved by bolting on shite to the current systems over the years instead of being designed with the desired end result problem space in mind. Eg: Colocation fees? WTF? This is a hack to move data closer to endpoints... like store and forward achieves by design.
kthx.