"Wayback Machine" in Legal Research

In an article entitled Lawyers Are Turning To Old Websites For Evidence appearing August 15, 2005 in Lawyers Weekly USA (the article is not perma-linked, so I'd expect this link to lead to a different article sometime in the near future), Reni Gertner describes how combing the depths of internet archives like the Wayback Machine is becoming common practice in many areas of legal research.

Using an online database called the Wayback Machine and archived web pages collected by companies like Google, lawyers are unearthing a wide range of web-based evidence, including websites that no longer exist and old versions of current sites.

Intellectual property lawyers have been using these techniques for a few years to locate old websites that demonstrate that their clients' trademark or domain name has been misused.

But the practice is now expanding into other areas of the law, where archived websites are providing helpful evidence in a host of other cases, including criminal cases, family law matters and product liability cases, among countless others. Attorneys say it's only a matter of time before these tools become commonplace in law offices and courtrooms across the country.

It's notable that legal researchers in the field of IP law are mentioned as the first to have utilized this tool -- specifically in connection with trademark and domain name litigation. However, the use of such archives is expanding into other areas of law, for instance, the article provides interesting examples of archived "nuggets" of information being used in criminal cases.

Gertner provides an excellent overview of how IP lawyers might use information pulled from the Wayback Machine, as well as discussions on the admissibility of archived web evidence in court, and the problems of determining actual authorship of archived material. Additionally, there is useful material regarding how to use the archives and a bit of information on how the Wayback machine and Google's 'cache' pages work.