Wayback Archives as a Law Tool 198
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The Wayback Machine's internet archive and Google's cached pages are becoming indispensable tools for some lawyers, especially specialists in intellectual-property law. Dell has used copies of expired websites to get the domain name DellComputersSuck.com transferred to it, the Wall Street Journal reports. EchoStar used Wayback in a case against a Polish TV company. Playboy checks Wayback to look for infringers of its trademark bunny or other images. And Wayback was even used to discredit a witness and reach a mistrial in a Canada murder case."
Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think that's the case, I don't think it even tries to grab the images from the server. At least with my webpage, I just clicked on the Nov 17th, 2001 archive... it had all the old images that I've long since deleted... and the server logs show no hits/404's for those images...
Maybe that's not always how it operates t
Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:2, Insightful)
I've often noticed that WBM pages load very slowly and I suspect that this is partly due to all the chained redirects yo
Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Text (Yes) Images (not always) (Score:3, Funny)
And this is a big deal why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know how (if?) its regulated, any insights into this?
But see, they signed a peice of paper (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But see, they signed a peice of paper (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But see, they signed a peice of paper (Score:2)
No, they're not. The Technician is merely saying, to the best of his knowledge, it is a true archive.
In court, a witness can not tell the truth and still not be commiting perjury. Haven't you ever seen or heard or read a transcript of a trial where one attorney will ask a witness, "And to the best of your knowledge?"
Re:But see, they signed a peice of paper (Score:3, Interesting)
That the priginal point isn't a problem was my point - that it was sarcasm is irrelevant to what was expressed.
Determining who to believe is what courts do. The technician swears under oath that the archive supplied hasn't been tampered with. The other side can argue the testimony is untrustworthy or that the technician can't know. It's no different than a doctor saying "yes those X-rays are of the person in question and were taken on this date".
Or a police officer saying "He ran a red light".
Yes it's n
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:5, Interesting)
For one its not quite as verifiable. Who is to say, for example, that someone with access to the Wayback servers couldn't put their own content and dates on there, and then use that as "evidence" for some suit?
I don't know how (if?) its regulated, any insights into this?
I work at The Archive. There are only two people, three at most, with the expertise and access to pull something like this off, and if someone tried Brad would almost definitely notice. There are checks in place to detect bitrot in the web archive, and altering older ARCs to include new information would be detected as bitrot and flagged for closer attention. They would then be compared against the copies in our sister organization's data cluster in Europe, and possibly also compared against the copies in the datacenter in Egypt.
To make it work, you'd pretty much have to get Brad to play along, and he is fanatical about the integrity of the web data. I don't think you could pay him enough to do it, and he doesn't have any sons or daughters you could kidnap for blackmail.
How one would go about demonstrating all of this in court, though, I do not know. IANAL.
-- TTK
disclaimer (Score:4, Informative)
I do not speak for The Archive. The above post should not be considered to reflect the official position of The Archive. It is purely my own personal opinion, and it was uttered under the influence of painkillers (I had my wisdom teeth yanked out of my jaw Wednesday, qv my Slashdot journal entry). Else I probably would have refrained -- talking about this at all while there's a court case pending was probably a really stupid idea, and I (usually) know better.
-- TTK
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:2)
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:2)
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:2)
That's fine, assuming he actually has integrity, and that he will live forever.
For the sake of arguement, I believe that this Brad guy has a lot of integrity.
Now, does he live forever? Will he be in this position forever?
if either of those is No, then the system will fall apart.
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:2)
Re:And this is a big deal why? (Score:2)
The point is that in many cases today, the contents of a website over time can be gold. I have cracked many cases this way -- it used to be my secret weapon. Now everybody knows. Darn.
Not everything is archived .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not everything is archived .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Example:
www.copstalk.com used to be the home page for a maker of Macintosh to PC via Appletalk cross platform communications tools. They were later bought out. If you wish to look at documentation on their older products, go to the WBM. www.copstalk.com these days IS A PORN SITE.
In Contrast to (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
Well, unless the keyboard is new the keys are dirty you know...
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
Re:In Contrast to (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, how did this get modded "Interesting"?
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
BTW, your bit isn't that funny.
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
Someone had to do it (Score:3, Funny)
close (Score:2)
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
New Windows vulnerabilities announced here lead to a rehash of all the FOSS vs closed-source jokes and other stuff while tones mysteriously get more serious when FOSS vulnerabilities are found.
Internet archives are bad and violations of copyright which lawyers will complain loudly about when they have to face incriminating evidence coming from such services... but when internet archives contain evidence needed to close cases, they suddenly become indispensable tools.
N-
Re:In Contrast to (Score:3, Insightful)
Has nothing to do with morality -- being a lawyer is a job. A lawyer can argue one day about poor quality tools and the next day that those tools are high quality (as long as it is in a different case, that is!) because that's his or her job -- to zealously represent the interests of his or her client. Lawyers don't deal with "truth" in that way -- the truth is for the jury to determine -- so its not a moral issue of lying one day and telling the t
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
Also, since IANAL, I wonder if the other side would be able to use the lawyers previous statements in the next case.
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
For the parties involved, that's very true. But the attorneys themselves generally do not have a stake in the outcome.
Just because its a job doesn't mean you do whatever it takes.
Actually, you do have to do whatever it takes (as long as it is legal and ethical, that is) -- attorneys take an oath to do so. If an attorney didn't do everything legally and ethically possible to win his client's case, then he is not being the "zealous advocate" that he promised the state he would
Re:In Contrast to (Score:2)
Of course it is. In fact, here's the relevant statute i California:
Professional Conduct, Rule 5-200
In presenting a matter to a tribunal, a member:
(A) Shall employ, for the purpose of maintaining the causes confided to the member such means only as are consistent with truth;
(B) Shall not seek to mislead the judge, judicial officer, or jury by an artifice or false statement of fact or law;
(C) Shall not intentionally misquote to a tribunal the language o
Employers are using Google too (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Employers are using Google too (Score:4, Informative)
Bloggers learn the price of telling too much [cnn.com]
Re:Employers are using Google too (Score:2)
Re:Employers are using Google too (Score:2)
This is exactly why I use this and other disjoint usernames. I have managed to get almost all of my old usenet postings pulled from DejaNews / Google Groups. Only one of my 3 blogs has my name on it and my website's essentially blank, though I'm close t
I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
See, if I am beating the crap out of you, but stop before the police get there and witness it, that doesn't mean I wasn't beating the crap out of you and therefore guilty of battery.
It's a weird example, but it works.
If you've ever read some of the RIAA threat letters you'll notice they specifically state that just because you listen and pull down the offending material doesn't mean they're giving up their right to sue you for posting it in the first place.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
I can't believe I actually have to point that out to someone.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
Make sense now? Even if you are NOT ignorant of the law, you can still be screwed.
Just the process of defending yourself can bankrupt you (that is if you had enough $$$ to mount any kind of defense at all in the first place.)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's copyright infringement, whether or not you know the material is copyrighted, or have reason to know.
Copyright law does provide for reduced penalties in the case where the "infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringemen
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
If you said it in a public place, it's fair game. The Internet is a public place for the most part.
The rules are a little different from criminal liability, but if you say something in public, it's public, and you can't do much about stopping others from using it, even in court.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/01/1
This one just relies on taking an old post out of context to 'shed light' on a current situation.
It also got wayback sued. (Score:5, Interesting)
Infinite Loop (Score:4, Funny)
One easy workaround... (Score:5, Informative)
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
My site is not archived there, problem solved.
(Of course, if another of these service pops up...)
Re:One easy workaround... (Score:2)
Re:One easy workaround... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:One easy workaround... (Score:2)
So perhaps censoring the archive is wrong? Signed? (Score:5, Informative)
Destroying evidence? If I don't want to be caught and ask for older web pages to be removed, that may contain incriminating evidence such as illegal copies of things or illegal links, is this different from a request by any other copyright holder to have his pages removed, and can it be punished? What are the archives retention policies, and have legal orders been served to prevent destruction of evidence?
What would be even better would be if the archives digitally signed their archives and kept signatures even of those things that had been asked to remove so that the validity of a copy could be established if made for legal purposes (SCO, Scientologists, and other things come to mind) even if later censored.
Re:So perhaps censoring the archive is wrong? Sign (Score:2)
But how can you force the submitter of the removal request to store a copy, let alone an exact copy, from which the checksum can be calculated?
If the submitter keeps the page it is not necessarily the same set of bytes as the removed one (think dynamic pages).
Hey Mr. Peabody! (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, theres been many times I would want to kiss the person running wayback. I lost my home a few years back and had several websites that I lost because I hosted out of my house. I have been able to rebuild, or come fairly close to duplicating those original sites.
As for lawyers, if there wasn't somebody already archiving all these sights, they'd get someone to do it for them and then it would not be accessible to the public. I guess we need to take the good with the bad on this.
Re:Hey Mr. Peabody! (Score:2)
You should have tried harder to find it, whenever you lose something, it is always in the last place you look.
Childish Grudges (Score:2, Insightful)
The childish nature of these corporations is ridiculous. Looking through archives of up to nine years just to point out: "Hey, you said we suck!" Who cares.
If Dell did not suck, they would not have to be so defensive.
Re:Childish Grudges (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Put another way... (Score:2)
Incidentally, whether or not I know how to speak to a lady has no bearing on the serious flaw (both logically and morally) in your original post. But it's a nice way of shifting attention away from my point.
-h-
Sweet History! (Score:2)
Proof and Evidence : The 'secret' to wining a case (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have evidence, you can prove your claims. If you can prove your claims, you win a dispute. If you win the dispute in favor of your client, that makes you one good lawyer.
Re:Proof and Evidence : The 'secret' to wining a c (Score:3, Funny)
False info being planted (Score:3, Interesting)
How can the info in wayback.org or google be trusted ? You can make redirect pages based on googlebot or wayback that have nothing to do with what is really on the site.
In the article it is mentioned that vodaphone.com was taken by a squatter and they used wayback to show that her intentions were "intended to misleadingly attract consumers"
I think that if someone wants to they can plan ahead and use this in a nefarious fashion.
Re:False info being planted (Score:2)
Their case would have gone forward just the same, except that they would have avoided showing that page.
If the person were to bring it up in an attempt to say, "hey, this wasn't nefarious!" then they would attempt to prove it discredible.
The same person was able to do the same to the WBM. Show us that the page that it's claiming that you were displaying at this date isn't what you really had up there, and the jury can decide.
Re:False info being planted (Score:3, Informative)
robots.txt (Score:3, Informative)
I used the Wayback machine to grab thousands of messages from an old WWWBoard-based message board that I ran, for eventual conversion to vBulletin. Some years, the Wayback Machine crawled every month; others it didn't even visit. Probably 80% of the messages that were posted before 2000 are lost to the ether of cyberspace. Guess you can't expect it to archive everything.
Re:So the archives are still kept even w / robots. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So the archives are still kept even w / robots. (Score:2)
Here's what happens, I think:
This is absolutely correct and consistent with previous experiences with WBM.
Old Drivers (Score:4, Informative)
Transposition (Score:2)
Or maybe this was intended: "Internet Acrhive's Wayback Machine's internet archive."
time to buy google stock again (Score:2)
Playboy (Score:5, Funny)
So they're basically just sitting around surfing porn too, eh?
If only there was a Firefox extension (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, wait, there is one [mozilla.org].
has anyone used this for finding terrorists (Score:3, Interesting)
Same with the london bomings, no?
Re:has anyone used this for finding terrorists (Score:4, Funny)
Usenet and the Internet Archive (Score:2)
For what it's worth, the Internet Archive has at least at one point in its history collected Usenet posts. This isn't in the Wayback machine, though.
http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#The_Wayback _ Machine [archive.org]
logos and other images (Score:3, Funny)
In a related story, managers at Playboy have taken note of productivity differences between John Salem, who was tasked with finding instances of people illegally using the playboy logo, and Henry Waxman, who has been looking for instances of "other images," but has been observed taking frequent bathroom breaks.
they should fund it (Score:2)
I think its widely recognized that the Internet Archive is general societal good, it should be funded as such.
Quick! Someone tell Karl Rove... (Score:2)
http://web.archive.org/web/20030720060539/http://
One of those IANAL questions (Score:2)
Canada murder case? (Score:2, Funny)
- Peace
There ought to be a Law (Score:3, Informative)
I bet the (so-called) Church of Scientology gets everything they want pulled.
In addition, Web-site operators can prevent material from remaining in the public domain by using a piece of computer code, known as a robots.txt file, which stops bots belonging to the Wayback Machine and regular search engines from copying pages.
This is pretty bogus because it only works if there is still a current web-site at the spidered address that is on-line and can deliver a robots.txt file saying DON'T! It has already been proven in another case that rapid-fire multiple requests to WBM will cause it to give up pages even when robots.txt says not to.
I see two ways to fix this problem of misuse of a valuable archive:
1: Federal law PROHIBITING the use of evidence from the Wayback Machine in court trials. This is a valuable historical archive that will be less valuable if people worry that it can be used against them in the future in unforeseen ways, and block contributing to it. How many sites already block the WBM TCI/IP address range?
2: WBM could simply announce that they refuse to cooperate in any future trials -- AND THEN DO EXACTLY THAT! Without them to attest to the accuracy of the retrieved data, many cases relying on that data would fall flat on their faces.
Think for a moment. The WBM was not created to make lawyer's lives easier, and their law firms richer!
Re:There ought to be a Law (Score:2, Insightful)
Problem solved since WBM can impossibly keep that much data on revision-proof media.
How do you think he does it? (Score:2)
I don't know (Score:2)
Re:School (Score:2)
[OT: DoD] Re:School (Score:2)
And they don't mind you posting with the nym of the ex-Info Minister of Iraq? Hooray! A little rose of humour blooms in the darkest depths of the Pentagon's labyrinths!
--Ng
Re:[OT: DoD] Re:School (Score:2)
Re:[OT: DoD] Re:School (Score:2)
A little rose of humour blooms in the darkest depths of the Pentagon's labyrinths!
What about Shub-Internet [ic.ac.uk]?
Re:School (Score:4, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:School (Score:2)
district office REALLY didn't like encrypted traffic going in and out via ssh thou..
Re:School (Score:2)
www.archive.org.nyud.net:8090. Ta-da!
I like hardware sites... (Score:3, Insightful)
New PowerBook Family
Addressing the needs of customers in small offices, home offices, business and education, Apple announced the Macintosh PowerBook 1400 series, combining 117MHz PowerPC speed with a removable CD-ROM drive and expansion options.
Ah 1996 was how long ago? I remember lusting after those 117Mhz.
Re:What about copyrights? (Score:2)
Not so sure. Is it a violation for a library to circulate a book after it's gone out of print? Or for a bookstore to sell one?
Re:What about copyrights? (Score:2)
Re:What about copyrights? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. It really is. It's a registered member of the American Library Association. Details on http://www.archive.org/about/about.php [archive.org]
It's an honest to God library, which also means that Section 108 of the USC on Copyright applies. Public libraries in the US (and here in the UK) have some pertinent exemptions to the copyright restrictions that bind us mere mortals.
--Ng
Re:The question is... (Score:2)
Re:The question is... (Score:2)
Well Mr. "cached", why don't you tell us?