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July 14, 2005
Internet Archive sued
The Internet Archive and its front end, the Wayback Machine, are the targets of a lawsuit, the New York Times reports today, by Healthcare Advocates. The other defendant in the lawsuit is a Philadelphia law firm that used the Wayback Machine to gather information about Healthcare Advocates in preparing a previous case.
Healthcare Advocates claims that the law firm and the Internet Archive have infringed on the copyright of their web pages, which are stored in the Internet Archive's database, as well as violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A further issue is that Healthcare Advocates' web site had used the technique of "robots.txt" to prevent the Internet Archive's web-crawler bot from gathering displaying information it had gathered from the company's web site. The Internet Archive's bot respected the robots.txt command (although that is purely voluntary, and there would have been no legal requirement to do so), but it was still possible to search and find some of the pages that Healthcare Advocates had hoped to suppress by means of the robots.txt command.
Legal experts quoted in the article claim that it will be very difficult to prove violations of the copyright act. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive had no comment.
Posted by tdr at July 14, 2005 03:57 PM
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Comments
Yes, I can read slashdot, how about some commentary?
Posted by: csh11 at July 14, 2005 07:30 PM
Well, perhaps you read slashdot, but not everyone who reads this blog does. (In fact, I don't read it regularly.) My point is to pass along news that others might not necessarily see otherwise. You didn't provide any commentary either.....
If you want my opinion, this particular lawsuit seems contrived, because the Wayback Machine is a well-established internet resource that contains NOTHING BUT copyrighted materials, if one considers the fact that all of the content created since the web was invented is under the copyright of its respective creator, whether stated on the page or not. It's actually somewhat surprising that somebody has not sued them before. But to say that the law firm who are the co-defendents in the suit broke the DMCA is really stretching it, since the material in the Internet Archive is not protected by any kind of technial means (which is one of the tests of the DMCA.
Posted by: Tim Robson at July 14, 2005 11:47 PM
This lawsuit can open the doors for a bunch of lawsuits, if successful. The Internet browsers we all use are based on maintaining a copy to speed up performance. If the lawsuit is successful, I would think anyone that uses something from their Internet cache on their computer could be held liable.
Posted by: Brian Gray at July 15, 2005 11:16 AM
It appears a new law being discussed in Canada would open the door for more law suits just like this. See CNET.com's article on Canadian Bill C-60 (http://tinyurl.com/ayol4).
Posted by: Brian Gray at July 19, 2005 04:07 PM
Too many lawyers...
Posted by: John at October 18, 2005 09:12 PM