Comment Lack of logic and legal background (Score 1) 801
This is all about a company trying to counter the evidence that shows they are wrong. What the plaintif is doing here is simply attacking a third party company for passively providing evidence against them.
Now whether these evidences were legally "passively" kept is another story.
Copyrights law sure are complicated to apply but as far as I recall form my law cursus at university, copyright infrigements can really be declared if there was a will to use a content and make some kind of profit out of it (whether financial or not). Otherwise, as said before, MS Internet Explorer and any other browser should be modified to avoid caching any webpages.
What IA is doing is simply using some program to crawl over the internet and copy webpages for archives purpose. Just compare it to recording your favorite show on television. Theorically it is not permitted because of the copyright laws, however, no one is going to sue you for doing so. It is tolerated by the lawmakers.
The difference is that IA is giving a public access to its "recordings". However, the content stored on their servers are not in use as such anymore by the website owner (otherwise it would only be a mirror of a website and not an archive). Since the copyright laws are made in the sense of protecting an author against people using his / her material in a way that alter the benefit resulting from this material, the law cannot fully apply here and would loose it sense if it does.
Also, if one succeed in winning a case against IA for similar reasons, it would mean that any single case where archives comming from archives bureau have been used should be cancelled and retrialled because of lack of regularity in the legal procedures.
Therefore, I think the plaintif might not have a good legal base for their case and that it is very unlikely they get any good from this. On the contrary, they show their guilt to the public and weaken their position in their other case against the similarly named company. After all no one would sue someone for providing or helping to provide evidence in the one's favor.
Now whether these evidences were legally "passively" kept is another story.
Copyrights law sure are complicated to apply but as far as I recall form my law cursus at university, copyright infrigements can really be declared if there was a will to use a content and make some kind of profit out of it (whether financial or not). Otherwise, as said before, MS Internet Explorer and any other browser should be modified to avoid caching any webpages.
What IA is doing is simply using some program to crawl over the internet and copy webpages for archives purpose. Just compare it to recording your favorite show on television. Theorically it is not permitted because of the copyright laws, however, no one is going to sue you for doing so. It is tolerated by the lawmakers.
The difference is that IA is giving a public access to its "recordings". However, the content stored on their servers are not in use as such anymore by the website owner (otherwise it would only be a mirror of a website and not an archive). Since the copyright laws are made in the sense of protecting an author against people using his / her material in a way that alter the benefit resulting from this material, the law cannot fully apply here and would loose it sense if it does.
Also, if one succeed in winning a case against IA for similar reasons, it would mean that any single case where archives comming from archives bureau have been used should be cancelled and retrialled because of lack of regularity in the legal procedures.
Therefore, I think the plaintif might not have a good legal base for their case and that it is very unlikely they get any good from this. On the contrary, they show their guilt to the public and weaken their position in their other case against the similarly named company. After all no one would sue someone for providing or helping to provide evidence in the one's favor.
