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occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made.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

[TemporalBeing]

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.

FYI - the courts require that web content have screen shots taken with time-date stamps to avoid this exact issue. The screen shots must also contain the information in a certain manner, only then can it be used as evidence/exhibits. If the lawyers are not doing that, then they are not properly writing/citing their court paperwork (briefs, etc).

And no, it does not amount to a copyright violation.

IANAL, but that's my understanding thanks to Groklaw and other sources.

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:404 Not Found

[Dishevel]

Each of them has taken an oath and each of them would rather have things go their way than to follow the constitution.

Take the health care act. The court had to first rule that the congress meant the law to become something they specifically stated that it was not. A tax. Then make it legal that way. They stretched to make it "Constitutional". This is not something that has just happened lately either. The US Supreme court has been doing this type of thing for many, many decades. Once they did the stamp act for Machine Guns they made their statement then. "When we think something is right we will tear away at the constitution to implement it." Agree or disagree with the law itself the US Supreme Court is and has been filled with people who have taken an oath they have non intention of following.

If it makes you feel better you can write me off as a non thinker who gets his marching orders from Limbaugh, Hannity or Fox News. The truth though is I believe in the greatness of the country as founded. The libs want guns gone. The Pubs want to "protect my right to hunt and protect myself from other people."

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

That is why you need an AR-15. They are already making information illegal. with information people can make guns and explosives and generally scary things. So they will "protect" us by vetting what information we can and can not have access to. "Just to protect the children and to save us from terrorists." Government is not your mother or your father. Government is not your uncle. Government is a needed service that can (if allowed to become to powerful) be your worst enemy.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Again Thomas Jefferson.

Well that's easily remedied

[Anonymous Coward]

They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.

Re:Well that's easily remedied

[Half-pint HAL]

They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.

...which is precisely what I did when I went back to university. I gave all citations with the original URL and an archive.org one. I hoped at the uni would pick up on it and recommend it to the other students, but it never happened....

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.

Re: Well that's easily remedied

[ibwolf]

Links to the WBM contain the original URL and a timestamp so it would be easy to redirect it. The issue is however unlikely to come up as Wayback links are meant to be long-term stable. They've already survived one complete rewrite of the underlying application.

Appendices?

[spamchang]

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.

Wait a minute

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:Wait a minute

[The Grim Reefer]

* Lawyer: "Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "Did you check for blood pressure?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "Did you check for breathing?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?"

* Witness: "No."

* Lawyer: "How can you be so sure, Doctor?"

* Witness: "Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar."

* Lawyer: "But could the patient have still been alive nevertheless?"

* Witness: "Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere."

Good thing the NSA has it all backed up!

[the_scoots]

Good thing the NSA has it all backed up!

screen capture + URL shortener

[ffflala]

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.

Re:screen capture + URL shortener

[TheRealMindChild]

and ideally uses a URL-shortening function like goo.go or bit.ly

WHY? I never click on such links for the elementary fact that I have no idea where they lead

Library of Congress 2.0

[Covalent]

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.

Re:Library of Congress 2.0

[NatasRevol]

I think that duty was passed to another part of the government.

dupe story

[noh8rz10]

dupe

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/122210/implications-of-broken-links

I keep saying this, mod me down again, plz.

[VortexCortex]

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.