The internet is an invaluable tool for research. The amount of information that's available is truly astounding. For example, there are a number of ways to 'recover' old websites or web pages that no longer display on the internet. This information can be very helpful to lawyers that want to demonstrate what information existed or was displayed on a website, or available to a party in a lawsuit at a particular point in time.
Last week, I saw an article in the New York Lawyer that originally appeared in the New Jersey Law Journal. The article concerns a federal lawsuit against an internet database operator, Internet Archive, and a Philadelphia law firm (Harding Early Follmer & Frailey) accused of 'hacking into' information in the Internet Archive system that was supposed to have been protected from view. The suit was brought by Healthcare Advocates, Inc. and arose out of Harding Early's use of Internet Archive's wayback machine to seek information about Healthcare Advocate's previous web content to dispute claims made against Harding Early's client (Health Advocate) in an intellectual property dispute.
Although use of the wayback machine is not in itself alleged to be improper, the lawsuit claims that Harding Early improperly used the tool to obtain web content that Healthcare Advocates had previously blocked. Harding Early claims that the activity which is alleged to be 'hacking' was really just repeated attempts to obtain the same information, and that when their initial attempts failed, they were advised by the Internet Archives system to 'try again.'
Law.com published another article about the suit which provides more details.
If you're interested, Internet Archive is an internet 'library' of resources, begun with the recognition that information doesn't always last in this form. The wayback machine allows you to enter a web address and then click on dates for which that site's pages are available.
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