After losing a trademark infringement suit against a competitor, Healthcare Advocates - a patient advocacy organization based out of Philadelphia - sued the intellectual property law firm that represented the defendant in the trademark action, alleging that the firm had "hacked" the Wayback Machine in order to view blocked archives of its website.
The firm - Harding, Earley, Follmer & Frailey - used the Wayback Machine to look at past incarnations of Healthcare Advocates' site in order to gather evidence to defend against the original trademark infringement charges. Healthcare Advocates had a robots.txt file in place to prevent anyone from viewing the archived versions of its site, but the law firm was still able to bring up certain archived pages.
Healthcare Advocates argued that this constituted a circumvention of a technical measure designed to control access to a copyrighted work, which would violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The company alleged that the firm used the Wayback Machine to bypass its technical measure, the robots.txt file, in order to view its copyrighted website.
The US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania wasn't buying it, however. The court last week pointed out that the law firm didn't do anything out of the ordinary in order to gain access to the archived pages that Healthcare Advocates had intended to block. Instead, the Wayback Machine simply malfunctioned and allowed the firm to view material that should have been blocked.
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