The New York Times reports that the Internet Archive is being sued for failure to block a old version of plaintiff’s Web page on its WayBack Machine.
Selections from the article:
The Internet Archive was created in 1996 as the institutional memory of the online world, storing snapshots of ever-changing Web sites and collecting other multimedia artifacts. Now the nonprofit archive is on the defensive in a legal case that represents a strange turn in the debate over copyrights in the digital age.
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.
The suit contends, however, that representatives of Harding Earley should not have been able to view the old Healthcare Advocates Web pages – even though they now reside on the archive’s servers – because the company, shortly after filing its suit against Health Advocate, 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.