A WEBSITE called the Wayback Machine last week opened a gateway to more than
10 billion archived Web pages. But it also opened a can of worms.
The site (http://web.archive.org) has been using software robots to record
Web pages since 1996. But these include pages that were later removed by site
owners because they contained material that was pirated, illegal, or deemed too
sensitive. When the archive went live last week, the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission had to ask archive founder Brewster Kahle to pull sensitive
information the site had resurrected on America鈥檚 nuclear reactors鈥攚hich
the NRC had removed from its website after the 11 September attacks.
New 杏吧原创鈥檚 search of the Wayback Machine confirms the NRC
material has gone. But the potential problems don鈥檛 end there. We also found
copyrighted material that had been removed from a site because it was posted
without its owner鈥檚 permission.
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鈥淭here are definitely some potential legal issues with this archive,鈥� says
Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Wayback
Machine鈥檚 robots periodically record every page on the Web, unless they are
stopped by bot-blocking software. But the bots won鈥檛 know if, for example, a
site has been taken down because a judge has ruled it defamatory, or to settle a
lawsuit out of court. Nor can they identify pirated material or child
pornography.
Like the Wayback Machine, the Google search engine also stores copies of Web
pages in case servers fail. But this 鈥渃ache鈥� is flushed every three weeks, says
Google, adding that it removes sensitive material when asked.
US law imposes fines between $200 to $150,000 for copyright
infringements. And even though unwitting infringers usually pay the lower
amount, the presence of thousands of copyrighted works stored on pirate websites
could be ruinous for the Wayback Machine鈥檚 backers, who include the Library of
Congress and the National Science Foundation.
鈥淚t would be a real shame if copyright concerns were to deprive us of this
valuable public service,鈥� says Fred von Lohmann, a senior lawyer at the EFF.