PS Here's an example of a Wayback notice for a site which has been blocked. I used the Washington Post as an example.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.washingtonpost.com
Maarja
>>> [log in to unmask] 10/20/2005 5:05 PM >>>
From my use of the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) for research, the site appears to archive selected top pages and some, but not all, drill down links from various external websites.
Isn't the point of posting something on an external website to make it publicly available? At that point you give up some control of it, as far as third parties are concerned. Obviously, an organization's internal records management procedures have no effect on external users. The organization may schedule its own web based records but once it has chosen to put something out there for public consumption, it's awfully hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube, as President Richard Nixon's chief of staff Bob Haldeman once said.
For an example, I might use the Wayback machine today to look at some of CNN's coverage of September 11 (see http://web.archive.org/web/20010911200318/http://www.cnn.com/). But I could just as well have printed out that same page back on 9/11 and saved a hard copy at home for the last four years.
As far as a business is concerned, couldn't a competitor have printed out and filed information from another company's website, well before it became a snapshot in the Wayback machine? Records managers stress that records are scheduled by content, not by medium. So, if you look back to the pre-Internet age, aren't complaints about the Wayback Machine analogous to trying to retrieve all copies of promotional brochures you once mailed out, years after they were distributed throughout the country? A businessman might later have reason to regret what the brochures reveal but he's the one who once chose to mail 'em out.
I haven't followed this particular litigation very closely. I did read the article on the lawsuit in the Long Island Business News, via Nexis. The LIBN noted on August 19, 2005 that
"Last month, Healthcare Advocates Inc. in Philadelphia filed suit against regional rival Health Advocates and its law firm, Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey of Valley Forge, Pa., charging that the law firm's attorneys used the Wayback Machine to obtain restricted information on Healthcare Advocates' Web site in the course of investigating a trademark-violation case between the two companies.
By making numerous, repeated requests with the Wayback Machine, the attorneys bypassed the computer-code blocks Healthcare Advocates had established to thwart Wayback Machine searches, according to the suit."
But since the Wayback Machine's spider searches external websites, wouldn't the real issue be, why did the company put whatever information on its public website in the first place, info to which it later wanted to restrict access? Sounds like Bob Haldeman's toothpaste to me. If the info was potentially damaging, it shouldn't have been posted on an external site. Seems to me more like a cautionary tale about professional judgment, rather than a records management issue!
I can understand why there might be some copyright or usage concerns with some websites. But not all the drilldown links work at http//www.archive.org work. Otherwise, I'm sure newspapers such as the New York Times would be focusing on such sites. See http://web.archive.org/web/19990422141514/http://www4.nytimes.com/ for an example of a Waback machine snapshot of of the New York Times website in 1999.
Since I'm an historian, I'll close by noting that the Wayback Machine also is an interesting way to access old Federal agency websistes, such as
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nara.gov
or
http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://www.gao.gov.
I've even used the Wayback Machine at home while doing history work -- to download my own agency's old phonebook, LOL. See http://web.archive.org/web/19990128013908/www.gao.gov/about.htm . Our organizational structure has changed a great deal since then!
Maarja
Maarja Krusten
GAO Historian
Office of Quality and
Continuous Improvement (QCI)
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