It seems some lowlives (Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia) are suing The Internet Archive for archiving their old site. The apparant reason being that the cached pages in the archive were used against them in a trademark action suit:
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.
Beyond its utility for Internet historians, the Web page database, searchable with a form called the Wayback Machine, is also routinely used by intellectual property lawyers to help learn, for example, when and how a trademark might have been historically used or violated.
That is what brought the Philadelphia law firm of Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey to the Wayback Machine two years ago. The firm was defending Health Advocate, a company in suburban Philadelphia that helps patients resolve health care and insurance disputes, against a trademark action brought by a similarly named competitor.
In preparing the case, representatives of Earley Follmer used the Wayback Machine to turn up old Web pages - some dating to 1999 - originally posted by the plaintiff, Healthcare Advocates of Philadelphia.
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 lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Philadelphia, seeks unspecified damages for copyright infringement and violations of two federal laws: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
“The firm at issue professes to be expert in Internet law and intellectual property law,” said Scott S. Christie, a lawyer at the Newark firm of McCarter & English, which is representing Healthcare Advocates. “You would think, of anyone, they would know better.”
This is just grasping at straws here. It disgusts me that they’re suing the archive, who’s only crime is saving knowledge for generations to come. Shame on them!
For more on this read the NY Times article (annoying registration required, use Bugmenot to get around it).
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