Archived Web Pages

link

Copyrights
Access to Archived Web Pages Not DMCA
Violation Absent Affirmative Act of Bypassing


A law firm that looked at past versions of a Web site on the publicly accessible Internet Archive did not circumvent access controls in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when the malfunctioning archive allowed access to pages that the owner had wanted restricted, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled July 20 (Healthcare Advocates Inc. v. Harding, Early, Follmer & Frailey, E.D. Pa., No. 05-3524, 7/20/07)....

Healthcare Advocates Inc. is a Philadelphia-based organization that offers assistance to patients in communicating with health care providers. In 2003, Healthcare Advocates was the plaintiff in a trademark and trade secrets action in which the defendant was represented by Harding, Early, Follmer & Frailey, a Philadelphia law firm specializing in intellectual property law. In 2005, the defendant was granted summary judgment in that case. Flynn v. Health Advocate Inc., No. 03-3764 (E.D. Pa. Feb. 8, 2005).
During the discovery phase of the Flynn proceeding, Harding accessed the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and viewed archived versions of Healthcare Advocates' Web site. Printouts of the archived images were taken and used in the litigation proceeding.

The Internet Archives offers Web site operators a means of preventing access to archived screenshots through use of the robots.txt file. The Health Advocates Web site included this robots.txt file, which was intended to prevent access of archived screenshots on the Wayback Machine without a key. Because Harding was not given a key, Health Advocates claimed, its accessing of the screenshots constituted a circumvention of an access control.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007
ISSN 1535-1610
Reproduction or redistribution, in whole or in part, and in any form,
without express written permission, is prohibited except as permitted by the BNA Copyright Policy,
http://www.bna.com/corp/index.html#V