Keeper of Expired Web Pages Is Sued Because Archive Was Used in Another Suit - New York Times

Link: Keeper of Expired Web Pages Is Sued Because Archive Was Used in Another Suit - New York Times.

The Internet Archive was created in 1996 as the institutional memory of the online world, storing snapshots of ever-changing Web sites and collecting other multimedia artifacts. Now the nonprofit archive is on the defensive in a legal case that represents a strange turn in the debate over copyrights in the digital age.

Beyond its utility for Internet historians, the Web page database, searchable with a form called the Wayback Machine, is also routinely used by intellectual property lawyers to help learn, for example, when and how a trademark might have been historically used or violated.

"information that they had formerly made publicly available didn't stay hidden"

Apparently the case will come to dispute the robot.txt file automation. I am amazed that these sort of cases haven't come upon archive.org previously.