In the latest Internet lawsuit the Internet Archive has been sued over over Wayback Machine. If you don't know the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle founded it in 1996 to be like the great Library of Alexandria, containing all human knowledge, but he doesn't want it lost as that library was. The archive has been taking snapshots of the web (and other things) and is available for anyone to search through. One interface is the Wayback Machine which allows you to look at what any website looked like at any time since the archive started. As the article states, this has been useful for various lawsuits. Well someone who had this used against them is now suing the archive on copyright violation.
The sad part is, I'm willing to guess the archive will lose (IANAL). I think it's one thing to copy something for your own personal use (you do that whenever you surf, your browser copies the data to your machine so you can see it). But to then make that available to others is where copyright comes in. Google does the same thing with their cache. These things are all very useful, but they are in the questionable range of copyright law. Maybe this will be the impetus to get the law updated to modern technology, it's sorely needed.
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