Although I didn't know about the Wayback Machine when I first got sued, it quickly proved to be an invaluable resource once I learned of its existence.
Also known as the "Internet Archive," the Wayback Machine is a service that regularly saves copies of nearly every website on the Internet as a free resource to "researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public." The Wayback Machine allowed me to prove, for example, that my site included links to websites of the stores in the mall before Taubman's own website featured those links. (They were implying that I had copied those links from their site, a contention that the Wayback Machine easily disproved.) It also allowed me to recover information that, lacking the foresight to know that I was going to be sued, I had not saved, important things like the text of my site's original disclaimer and the approximate date on which I had added a link to my girlfriend's site.
I mention all this because I've learned that the folks who run the Wayback Machine are being sued for doing such an outstanding job on what must be an incredibly demanding but richly rewarding (in the non-financial sense) project. It seems that an intellectual property law firm (surprise!) doesn't like the fact that their opponent was able to use the Wayback Machine to gather information from archived copies of their client's website. The law firm isn't complaining that the information was inaccurate or incomplete. They simply don't appreciate the fact that the Wayback Machine has allowed someone to obtain perfectly accurate information about their client.
I guess that some lawyers feel that they can win cases only if their opponents have short memories. Unfortunately for them, the Wayback Machine ensures that our collective memory of what's been on the Internet is damn near photographic.
