Every once in a while, it's not an entirely bad thing when lawyers get sued, just to keep them honest. The case of Healthcare Advocates, Inc. v. Harding, Earley, Follmer & Frailey is one lawsuit that I was glad to see dismissed on summary judgment by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Users of the popular internet archive tool the Wayback Machine , will breathe a sigh of relief. The dispute began in early July 2005, when Healthcare Advocates filed suit against the law firm of Harding, Earley, Follmer & Frailey alleging, among other things, that the law firm violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's protections against circumvention of technological measures.  Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides "no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

In the Healthcare Advocates case, Healthcare Advocates had provided the Wayback Machine with the robots.txt code, which allows a site to opt out of inclusion in the Wayback Machine. The Healthcare Advocates' information had been made available on the Wayback Machine for at least five years previously. Harding found that, through persistent access of the Healthcare Advocates url on the Wayback Machine, they were able to access some of the historical pages notwithstanding the inclusion of the robots.txt file. An important distinction here is that the law firm, although aggressive in its tactics in accessing the site repeatedly, did not employ any de-encryption or other malicious methods to access the code. The Court granted the law firm's Motion for Summary Judgment emphasizing that the access was a result of errors on the part of the archive's server. This is a welcome relief to the many users of the Wayback Machine and to those whose best success in internet searching comes that moment right before they're ready to completely give up…when the only hope lies with that last attempt to make something happen, a volley of hundreds of random clicks dripping with frustration.

Photo courtesy of Paula Ouder, courtesy Louisian Sea Grant under Creative Commons.