First, a little background: Healthcare Advocates sued Health Advocates for trademark infringement in 2003; Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey used cached images from the Internet Archives in Health Advocates’ defense. The first company is now suing again, claiming that action was unlawful and illegal and that it bypassed the robot.txt file inserted shortly after the first suit was filed to stop search engine crawling. As the New York Times reports, the suit claims the law firm breached the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the Internet Archive committed various acts by failing to observe the robot.txt file and allowing the pages to be served.
Shore Communications explains why the case seems negligible in one regard — observing robot.txt is voluntary, not required — and why the issue raised is problematic for any entity storing, using or offering cached content. “The Internet Archive will probably come out a winner in this case, but we’re not likely to gain much further clarification on copyrights through this action. The onus is on electronic publishers of all stripes to package their content in a way that can make its proscribed legal uses clear within the body of the content itself.”
At Copyfight, Alan Wexelblat runs through it from the copyright perspective: “I remain convinced that this is the barest tip of a huge legal iceberg that is going to crash into the business of search engines and other ‘net archives, soon.”
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