Wayback Machine sued: DMCA
p2pnet.net News:- A famous non-profit Net historical archive, which stores snapshots of web sites, is being sued under Hollywood`s DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Beyond its utility for Internet historians, the Web page database, searchable with a form called the Wayback Machine, is also routinely used by intellectual property lawyers to help learn, for example, when and how a trademark might have been historically used or violated, says the New York Times, going on:
That is what brought the Philadelphia law firm of Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey to the Wayback Machine two years ago. The firm was defending Health Advocate, a company in suburban Philadelphia that helps patients resolve health care and insurance disputes, against a trademark action brought by a similarly named competitor.
But when it was putting the case together, Earley Follmer used the Wayback Machine to unearth web pages, some dating to 1999, originally posted by Healthcare Advocates and last week, Healthcare Advocates sued both the Harding Earley firm and the Internet Archive, saying the access to its old Web pages, stored in the Internet Archive’s database, was unauthorized and illegal, says the story.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Philadelphia, seeks unspecified damages for copyright infringement and violations
The suit contends that Harding Earley shouldn`t have been able to view the old Healthcare Advocates Web pages because shortly after filing its suit against Health Advocate, the company had placed a text file on its own servers designed to tell the Wayback Machine to block public access to the historical versions of the site, says the NYT.
Now the Internet Archive is accused of breach of contract and fiduciary duty, negligence and other charges for failing to honor the robots.txt file and allowing the archived pages to be viewed.
See:-
New York Times – Keeper of Expired Web Pages Is Sued Because Archive Was Used in Another Suit, July 13, 2005
July 13th, 2005 at 9:00 pm
isn’t it the equivalint of a digital library? I can’t see them sueing my local library when I can look up and browse though all sorts of copyrighted material, including music.
Also I would think the copyright holders of the origional Rocky and Bullwinkle show’s would sue them for using the term “The Wayback Machine.”
Rick
July 13th, 2005 at 9:42 pm
…the Internet Archive is accused of breach of contract and fiduciary duty, negligence and other charges…
Those thugging thieving b@$t@rd$ down at that den of iniquity, The Internet Archive. Man, those clean living honest lawyers need to really throw the book at them. I hear the Archive’s servers are actually located in hell…
You knew I was kidding, right?
July 13th, 2005 at 10:02 pm
lol. Thats true. and yes, tthe internet archive is a didgital form of a library, but you know how all those business men. They still live in the stone age, where you fight to gain land, treat your women like a sex object, and fire is only just being invented.
July 13th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
Contract? How is a robots.txt (which the search engine is being nice by following) a contract? When you make a website public, you have to understand that EVERYONE who views it is going to be saving it to their computer.
July 13th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
LOL, yeah, I knew.
July 13th, 2005 at 11:58 pm
At another site I made mention when the DMCA bill was being considered that it would not work for just the RIAA. At the time the RIAA said they would use the law as it was intended for their purposes. I had mentioned that could not be as it would be a national law and open to anyone to use, not just the RIAA. Here you have an attempt to shut down a site that holds info to past webpages. Not all that different than holding past news say from the radio or tv. If you can’t prove they said it, even if it was on national broadcast then, you don’t have a case. By controlling the broadcast flag they had the chance to pull that one off unless one used either a camcorder or a tape. Then you got into copyright issues. However, I suspect that the site in question here is already into copyright issues as you don’t have to register an item for it to be copyrighted. It is by default copyrighted unless it is put under GNU or Creative Commons. If the website holds a library exception then that would let it out but I doubt that it does.
This is nothing short of an attempt at censorship and you can look for more to follow. Again if the site didn’t have a past image of the old website, who can prove the old website held incriminating data? While the work-around of using robots.txt as the authorization for the claim is being used, how many actually see the file robots.txt? I don’t think the average web surfer will see it. Nor do I think they have much ground to stand on. Reason being that much of the stance of the RIAA has been it is entitled to obtain IP numbers by the supposition that you are in public, not private on the internet and that websurfers have no guarentee to privacy while they surf. Basically that hasn’t been questioned in court. By default as long as it is not questioned it remains a valid way to obtain info and not just ip numbers.
If you maintain a website it is up to you to control your security. If you surf the web, it is up to you to control your security also. If you don’t care about security, then don’t complain at every hacker and web crawler that comes across your data and uses it. Microsucks doesn’t promise security other than by lipservice. If you want that security you have to take extra steps that are not default settings or programs to do so. Unless robots.txt is a filter to prevent connections then they really have no case there. You don’t want someone in, you block their ip numbers or domain. Again, your security is your problem to deal with, not others.
July 14th, 2005 at 3:39 am
f*ck
it’s simple. if you don’t want it in the public domain, don’t release it!
If you put it out for people to read and it comes back to bite you in the ass, then I guess you should never have released it in the first place.
July 14th, 2005 at 5:03 am
…can be found here: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/aps/removal-policy.html
As far as I can see, the Internet Archive is not actually required by remove pages, but they do it anyway in accordance with a number of guidelines they have chosen to adopt.
If anyone can find an actual “contract” that the Internet Archive has between delisted sites, please let me know – I can’t find anything that even looks like a contract.
The most relevant thing I can see on the IA site is in one of the FAQs:
“The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection. By placing a simple robots.txt file on your Web server, you can exclude your site from being crawled as well as exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine.”
This is hardly a contract and could easily be classed as a friendly piece of advice. It does say later that “Internet Archive uses the exclusion policy intended for use by both academic and non-academic digital repositories and archivists. See our exclusion policy.”
The relevant exclusion policy is based on the guidelines which are specific on what actions should be taken for particular types of removal requests (so a lot depends on what type of removal request was made by Healthcare Advocates). None of the archiver’s responses are guarenteed however.
Alex H
July 14th, 2005 at 7:19 am
The Wayback Machine is a usefull tool that saves information thats was publicly viewable. Its not stealing anything, since our computers also save copys of websites, for a much shorter amount of time.
The reason this website is being sued, is because another company is being sued, because of data found by using Wayback Machine… which is perfectly fine! BUT since obviously the company doesn’t want to get sued because of the Wayback Machine, they are blaiming their problems on it…
Bottom line… you can’t sue or say its illegal for a website to save PUBLICLY viewable information… If I could see it from anywhere at one point in time, without paying for it, then its perfectly fine to save that info, in the name of history! The Wayback Machine is very helpful to a LOT of people, because it saves useful information that isn’t available anymore, because the owner of the original site either removed it, or couldn’t afford to keep it up…
THIS IS YET ANOTHER REASON THE DAMN DMCA SHOULD NOT BE A LAW! THIS KIND OF ABUSE IS EXACTLY WHY ITS SUCH A BAD THING!
September 20th, 2005 at 6:09 am
They need to go all the way and sue every operator, isp, company, system admin, etc. that ever run a caching proxy server that may have picked up their documents.
Why stop with the “digital library” (aka wayback machine) lets just sue everyone.
What about everyone that had a packet sniffer running. Track them down and sue them too!
Oh, let us not forget anyone who viewed the site that had their browser set to cache.
Just a thought. If we’re going to be retarded, we should go all the way.
December 7th, 2005 at 10:39 pm
Browser cache is a good point. That stuff stays on your hard drive indefinitely… I guess we’re all guilty.
Also, what about Google? Ever click that little “Cashed” link? That suff usually only persists a couple weeks (depending on how frequently the googlebot checks the site) but it’s the same thing in principal.