A Wacky Wayback Story
A website that archives old web pages, The Wayback Machine, figured heavily in a bizarre lawsuit from Massachusetts recently. Here’s the story:
Lawfirm is hired to represent a client. As part of their representation, they research the opposing party by accessing pages on the company website, and by searching through older versions of the website via the Wayback machine. Lawfirm prints copies of the relevant web pages for use in court.
The opposing party, whose webpages have been viewed and copied by the law firm, now files a separate lawsuit against the law firm for copyright infringment and violations of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Their argument is that their copyright in the webpages was infringed when the lawfirm printed copies to use in court. The DMCA was violated, they alleged, because they had attempted to block the Wayback Machine from making archived copies of their website accessible by way of a piece of code inserted in their site - an attempt to block which failed because of a malfunction on the part of the Wayback Machine, about which the law firm had no knowledge.
The lawfirm won on both counts, which is a good thing. Frankly, though, the frequent inherent injustice in the “justice system” was on full display in this case, becasue the law firm - which was just doing it’s job in a very reasonable way - spent two years and $170,000 defending itself. So far. The decision has been appealed.
The opinion in the case can be seen in its entirety here. Thanks to the MassLaw Blog for bringing this stupid case to light.
Got a few hundred bucks to spare? Check this out.
December 1st, 2007 at 6:00 am
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