Internet Archive, Digital Resource for the Law, Needs Help to Rebuild

Client Bulletin

November 11, 2013

Early in the morning of November 7, a serious fire damaged the San Francisco facility and equipment used by the Internet Archive. IA is a non-profit technical organization that, among its many projects, built and maintains the "Wayback Machine" – a digital archive of more than 150 billion live captures of Web pages dating in some cases back to 1996. In 2006, Elysium was honored to be part of the team that successfully defended the IA against allegations that a law firm's use of the Internet Archive constituted a CFAA violation.

Today, the IA could use our help and yours to recover from the fire. Thankfully, no one was hurt and the IA's core asset, its more than 10 petabytes of data, was not destroyed. However, the company estimates its equipment losses at approximately $600,000, a considerable setback for a non-profit.

The Archive is a tremendous resource for litigators and companies, like Elysium, that help attorneys in technology matters. As we've assisted our clients, the Wayback Machine has enabled our consultants to:

identify older versions of web sites that themselves constituted prior art in patent cases
identify file names of old versions of software that constituted prior art in patent cases
identify on-sale bar issues and assess what would be known to a PHOSITA
determine the prior state of web sites for copyright and trademark cases
analyze linking between sites at a point in time for computer forensics matters
retrieve and analyze previously existing contents from forums and blogs for computer forensic matters

The Internet Archive also hosts the data behind RECAP, a free browser plugin that makes millions of court documents available to the public at no cost.

We hope that you will join Elysium Digital in making a donation to the Internet Archive so they are able to quickly address this disruption and continue the work that has given the legal community such rich resources.

Sincerely, Jeremy Lang