SearchEngineWatch discusses a recently-filed lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Healthcare Advocates, Inc. isn’t happy that opposing lawyers in some other litigation were able to use the Wayback Machine to pull up some of the company’s old webpages. SEW has a 48-page PDF of the complaint online.
Many of the charges are against the law firm, but the complaint slaps Internet Archive with counts of breach of fiduciary duty, negligent misrepresentation, and a couple other things because Internet Archive’s robots.txt exclusion policy failed to block access to Healthcare Advocates’ pages.
[Typo corrected 7/18/05.]
Publishing is Publishing…
What if, while those pages where available on their web site, someone printed them out and just kept them in a file cabinet for future use? What if this information had been published in a printed journal, book, annual report, etc. and someone just happened to still have it? If they were freely accessible at one time or another, you should assume that they always will be. Adding a robots.txt is not going to keep individual people from “saving” the information. If they were afraid of someone down the road having that information, they never should have freely posted it. Just because the Internet Archive said they wouldn’t index it doesn’t mean someone else won’t save it, print it, etc. Freely posted information is such forever.
Complex DMCA claim, law firm involving access
I’ve been writing about this at length over at my my own blog (Infothought), with some technical speculations and a counter-argument:
Internet Archive DMCA Circumvention Lawsuit. html
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000877
Internet Archive DMCA “Circumvention” – Access vs. Copying. html
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000878
Proposition: OPT-OUT controls are not DMCA access controls. html
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000879