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Federal Judge Says Internet Archive's Wayback Machine A Perfectly Legitimate Source Of Evidence
Tim Cushing, reporting for TechDirt (condensed): Those of us who dwell on the internet already know the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" is a useful source of evidence. So, it's heartening to see a federal judge arrive at the same conclusion, as Stephen Bykowski of the Trademark and Copyright Law blog reports.From the report: The potential uses of the Wayback Machine in IP litigation are powerful and diverse. Historical versions of an opposing party's website could contain useful admissions or, in the case of patent disputes, invalidating prior art. Date-stamped websites can also contain proof of past infringing use of copyrighted or trademarked content.From TechDirt: The defendant tried to argue that the Internet Archive's pages weren't admissible because the Wayback Machine doesn't capture everything on the page or update every page from a website on the same date. The judge, after receiving testimony from an Internet Archive employee, disagreed. He found the site to a credible source of preserved evidence -- not just because it captures (for the most part) sites as they were on relevant dates but, more importantly, it does nothing to alter the purity of the preserved evidence.
Just submit a DMCA request. Poof!
Internet Archive has a DMCA Exemption http://archive.org/about/dmca....
A random private citizen who is know for pointing a video camera at the relevant section of street every day. Like, say, some business that operates a surveillance security camera where the field of view includes the crime scene. Evidence like that is routinely gathered and used in court.
Archive.org operates a similar video camera pointing at many web servers.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
This is equivalent to asking a random private citizen that has nothing to do with a case to testify as a witness in said case.
Er, what do you think an eyewitness is? Other than "random", but archive.org isn't randomly selected either.
Admitting the evidence is not the same as trusting it. The general rule is that any relevant evidence is admissible, and any evidence is relevant if "it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence." The Wayback Machine easily passes this test. The trier of fact has to look at all of the relevant evidence and make decisions about the quality of all of the items; he or she may decide that the data from the Wayback Machine is not of high quality. However, excluding the evidence means that the trier of fact cannot consider that evidence at all. It seems plain that the Wayback Machine is relevant evidence in an IP trial, as TFA says.