Link Rot and the US Supreme Court 161
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occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made.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."
404 Not Found (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why wouldn't you just compare him with Hitler (disfavorably) and be done for the day?
dupe story (Score:5, Funny)
dupe
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/21/122210/implications-of-broken-links [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I'm out of mod points, sorry!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm curious. How would comparing him to Hitler favorably work? Can you give an example?
Re: (Score:3)
In my opinion Antonin Scalia is one of the most charismatic public speakers in history. To me his speeches are every bit as compelling as those of Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill or Zig Ziglar.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you'd be better served assuming whenever a case comes before the Supreme Court that the Government has over-stepped its Constitutional authority. Read the Declaration of Independence and see the list of grievances against the King of England and ask yourself do you really think those same people would have wanted the Federal Government to have all the power it currently has?
Re: (Score:2)
Some of them, yes, given that both a compromise documents. Some of the Federalists in particular would, I think, have been perfectly all right with expansive views of the General Welfare, Interstate Commerce, and Necessary and Proper clauses.
Re:404 Not Found (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
I'm still not sure what the takeaway from this is, save the fact that in addition to being a senile old coot, racist, anti-semite, and all-around waste of oxygen Scalia is also clueless about technology.
In fact, generally assuming Scalia is wrong about everything will serve you well.
If you are truly honest you would understand that when you look at the court that it is filled with activist judges who care very little if at all for the Constitution and are just looking to make law that reflects what they want.
If you think it is just Scalia or just the Conservatives on the court that are evil you are either stupid or a liar,
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Which Justices advertise themselves as "originalists" who the Constitution as a document chiseled in stone, where all interpretation of current law is based on the Founders' original intent, and then choose to throw that belief away when it's inconvenient? Hint: It's not the "li
Re:404 Not Found (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Congresscritters can call legislation whatever they want in order to get votes for it. But that doesn't change its nature. If it looks like a tax, swims like a tax, and quacks like a tax, then it is probably a tax regardless of what some senator's PR page called it. SCOTUS ruled on what it was, not what it was called.
Re: (Score:3)
The court ruling that a bill created in the senate can become a constitutional law based on the taxing powers of congress is a lie. You know this. Right? I do not care if the law itself is good or bad. Unconstitutional.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Again Thomas Jefferson.
The problem is when the conversation is driven by groups that are unreasonably fearful of their government.
Still feel exactly the same way about it even if the original quote came from someone crazy like Ron Paul.
My point exactly.
Re: (Score:3)
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
The problem with this is that a gun or guns, or even a million people with guns has absolutely no chance against today's military. Blast your AR-15s at as many predator drones as you like. It will not do you a bit of good. If you do not win the military to your cause, then all the guns in the world will not help you fight physically against any tyranny the government pushes. It just will label you and your ilk as 'terrists'.
Re: (Score:2)
As a "lib"[eral/ertarian], I don't want guns gone. You want guns? Great. You want drugs? Great. Honestly, it's authoritarian libs who want guns gone just like authoritarian conservatives want to enshrine things like marriage, religion, etc in government. Oh, and most "Pubs" want guns to play with, be it play hunting or make believe that they're protecting themselves from other people. I say this
Re: (Score:2)
Still feel exactly the same way about it even if the original quote came from someone crazy like Ron Paul.
My point was that both the conservatives and the liberals are the enemy of the people. As long as they have the two groups fighting each other they can rape the people of their wealth and their freedoms with nothing to stop them.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a copyright violation. Let's hope that those court documents will never be seen by a lawyer.
Re: (Score:2)
~~
Well that's easily remedied (Score:4, Insightful)
They should just start linking through the Wayback Machine.
Re:Well that's easily remedied (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
Re:Well that's easily remedied (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
There's already an academic exemption to copyright. Excerpting to relevant passage is quite legal.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, it's illegal for them, but who's going to sue the Supreme court?
Re: (Score:3)
Or they could just make the copy, and wait for the related copyright case to come to the Supreme Court. :)
Re: (Score:2)
/win
Re: (Score:2)
That seems like a good idea, but what happens if the Wayback Machine decides to change their link format?
Re: Well that's easily remedied (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
And how are they going to survive being bought by Rupert Murdoch?
Re: (Score:2)
Why not just cite the original document? Do these no longer exist anymore? Ie, you cite the newspaper article itself, or a journal article, and so forth.
Appendices? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
. . . until robots.txt wipes out the archive.
Re: (Score:3)
The wayback machine retroactively applies robots.txt and they don't seem interested in making any exceptions to that policy. Even in cases where the current owner of the domain is not related to the owner of the domain at the time the material was archived.
The archive isn't strictly wiped out but from the perspective of us normal people it may as well have been.
IIRC they even managed to pursude a court that making an exception so that someone could look stuff up for a legal case would be undue hardship and
Re: (Score:3)
Read the FAQ on archive.org.
If you want to delete the archive of your site, edit robots.txt to disallow them. They will wipe out the archive - or at least "tombstone" it so it is visible to no one (who knows if it's actually deleted behind the scenes)
Re: (Score:2)
I often print to pdf pages that I would like to link to. Then I put a live link, and a pdf link on my pages.
When the live link rots, I remove it and substitute the pdf link. I make very little effort to track down revised pages. (Putting in redirects is their job, not mine).
So far, because of the topic area I do web construction for, I've only been called to task for this once, and that was from an agency that had a updated version of their rotted link, (and didn't know enough about redirects).
Most rotte
Re: (Score:3)
"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."
This is simply and purely a failure of Government to properly archive, long-term store, and maintain its records.
Anything cited in a Court decision should be saved, cataloged, and stored in a permanent place. Failure to do so is a big failure, indeed.
Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, training lawyers with incomplete information could lead to an unexpected revolution where we discard long-established precedents and rewrite all law as if it were born yesterday.
Especially in law which relies heavily on precedent, being able to find the actual precedents for comparison's sake would be critical, IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Why don't we take it to the logical extreme... "an infinite number of totally uninformed lawyers".
Would we get Shakespeare out of that if we gave them a bunch of typewriters?
Re: Wait a minute (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Presumably you've never needed a lawyer.
If you ever do, and your lawyer wants to cite to a case with a broken link referenced, it could impact you directly. Even if the linked page is still available somewhere, you might be paying $500/hour for your lawyer to find it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
However many lawyers you have, it's obviously better for them to understand the logic behind a decision, rather than just accepting the whole system as "just the way it is."
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
* 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."
Re: (Score:2)
Good thing the NSA has it all backed up! (Score:5, Funny)
Old news (Score:3)
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 [archive.org] to the Internet Archive.
Re: (Score:2)
All good points. If I may add to it:
I really wish web-sites would list the DATE as in month + year on their articles so can tell how old (or relevant) the information may be.
Microsoft has a really annoying habit of moving pages around. At least Microsoft and Apple put an unique identifier so even if pages get moved you can find it.
Whenever I come across anything interesting I usually "Print to PDF" so at least I have a semi-permanent form where I can search for keywords used in the document.
Re: (Score:2)
Groklaw [groklaw.net] noted a number of instances where websites were changed as a result of information revealed in court ... or on Groklaw as a result of research prompted by court documents.
screen capture + URL shortener (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
WHY? I never click on such links for the elementary fact that I have no idea where they lead
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. If I have no idea where a link is going, I'm sure as hell not trusting it enough to click on it.
I want to know what domain I'm going to, and since .ly is Lybia, not exactly an entity I'm going to give blanket trust to.
I don't trust URL shorteners because I have no idea who controls them or what's on the other end of a link. They've always struck me as a terrible idea.
Re: (Score:3)
Did you even read the original post before replying? The poster wanted a US government site that hosts static screen captures of web pages referenced in official documents. By implication you would know exactly where the link was taking you - to a government server that hosts images or PDFs of web pages.
Excepting the possibility that the NSA might be monitoring the documents you access, I can't really see
Re: (Score:2)
So you never go to a new domain? You only stick to the well known domains that you're use to? I'm sure nefarious individuals would only use domains like .ly and would never use a .com/.net/.org domain name.
Re: (Score:2)
Not without knowing what it is, and not in a browser that's allowed to do much more than load pages, ignore scripts, and block cookies.
I don't make it a practice to go to random links I can't tell where I'm going or visit a web site I've never heard of unless I have some idea of what it is.
I place very little trust in the internet as a rule.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Clicking on a link is blanket trust?
Who the fuck are you people that are scared of clicking on a link?
Re: (Score:2)
People using Windows and Internet Explorer?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone whose work connection is monitored has reason to distrust links that might go to porn. Anyone whose brain hasn't already had those circuits permanently fused has reason to distrust links that might be goatse, or worse. Plus of course there are always zero-days for every browser, and it's sometimes easier to link spam to get traffic than hijack an ad server.
Re: (Score:2)
WHY? I never click on such links for the elementary fact that I have no idea where they lead
That's not hard to work around. Bit.ly, for example, seems to use amzn.to for all shortened links that go to Amazon... if you click one of those links, you know it goes to Amazon and not Goatse. The US government could presumably afford to set up a link-shortening service of their own which you can trust to go to a government site.
Re: (Score:2)
improper assumptions (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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 [sic] or bit.ly.
Indeed. Nothing lends more credence to a US Government document then putting all of its external references under the control of Greenland (.gl) and Lybia (.ly).
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't think it needed explanation here, but yes you are indeed correct: obviously this model would have to end in
Save it to write once media too. (Score:2)
I would also add that this should be done with a "write once" kind of storage back. This way we have some small assurance it was not modified.
You could go even further and keep a running log on the same medium that had an md5 of each previous content item which was then md5'd with the current.
This seems (to me at least) like it would provide a verifiable trail that shows the written contents were not tampered with.
Would this kind of scheme me useful? or am I missing something obvious?
Plain text and grep are your friends here (Score:2)
Library of Congress 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
While they're at it, they can probably archive nearly everything else.
Re:Library of Congress 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
I think that duty was passed to another part of the government.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they're archiving everything ever used by the citizens. They don't care about documenting the government.
Re: (Score:2)
Pfff! That creates liability!
Re: (Score:2)
I can't work out in my head how large a database that would have to be. Could you please estimate it in terms of Libraries of Congress.
Wait, is that recursive?
Re: (Score:2)
How much data storage would that take, measured in Libraries-of-Congress?
Re: (Score:2)
How much data storage would that take, measured in Libraries-of-Congress?
About 2.0
Memento project, yo. (Score:2)
http://www.metafilter.com/98913/Ancestors-we-will-never-know-presage-fe [metafilter.com]
This is why I never started an educational site (Score:2)
Someday, someone will have a good system to educate people spoon fed style on the Internet. For now, learning on the Internet can
Archive.org (Score:2)
Isn't this precisely the type of thing archive.org exists for?
CMS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All branches of the government could use a better Crap Management System.
Intranets suffers too. (Score:2)
Company intranets suffers also from link rot, and some are doing it worse by using tools that inherently promote link rot.
The point is that files are moved around on filesystems now and then "for better structure", "making it easier to find" and other lame excuses, but if every file had an unique ID that could be used to link with then they could move around the files as much as they like without causing harm.
Re: (Score:2)
Why link? (Score:2)
What the hell...? (Score:2)
Court documents actually just list a link? With no copy/printout of what it links to? Really? If ever there was a doubt about how stupid and clueless judges are, it's that fact they allow shit like this to exist in official court documents.
What next? Someone puts in their court document to "Google it"? Seems that would probably be better than a permanent link.
No problem (Score:3)
The only link that matters still works.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html [archives.gov]
Too bad they can't reference this one more.
They were intended to be permanent <EOM> (Score:2)
Re:They were intended to be permanent (Score:2)
I keep saying this, mod me down again, plz. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
This is why violating copyright is mandatory (Score:2)
Copy the site into an evidence database (Score:2)
Every time you make a citation, copy it into a legal database, and then reference that entry into the database IN ADDITION to original URL. Include date and time... end of controversy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, don't want to sound like a dick or nothin', but, ah... you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that Julian Assange talked about doing this in an interview I read. It really does make a lot of sense. You can make sure you have the right document and that it has not been altered.
Ha! I found it! Interview with Assange and Eric Schmidt.
http://techpresident.com/news/23773/googles-eric-schmidt-and-wikileaks-julian-assange-get-one-anothers-jokes [techpresident.com]
"Schmidt asks Assange what technologies he's looking out for to make it easier for an anonymous sender to reach out to a dubious recipient. He responds:
Re: (Score:2)