Judge Rules Wayback machine is fair game

[DNQuest.com]

I did not see this posted anywhere, so I thought here it goes.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1185181604443

"A law firm did not violate copyright and computer anti-hacking laws when it used a Web archive search tool to recover old Web pages of its client's adversary, says a federal judge."

 

[labrocca]

Good ruling. That's like saying you can't use old newspaper clips. I don't even know how opposing counsel even thought this would pass.

 

[jberryhill]

I haven't read the article, but I'm familiar with the case.

The issue here was much narrower than the OP suggests.


The point was that the website owner had configured its robots.txt to block archive access. Ordinarily that will be effective to block access to all archived versions of the site.

However, when you do an archive.org access, the current robots.txt status is checked. If the website in question is down, then archive will see no robots.txt and will allow access to the stored pages.

The website owner was here claiming that the people who had obtained the archive version must have circumvented the robots.txt mechanism of archive.org. Hence, the claim was under the anti-circumvention provisions of the ACPA, and the decision was limited to those issues.

This is not a ruling stating that anything is "fair game", nor is it a decision on the underlying legality or not of the way that archive.org works.

 

[bobdigital]

Thanks for the clarification , Mr Berryhill.