Is not that Ephemeral -- the Wall Street Journal has an interesting story:
Lawyers' Delight: Old Web Material Doesn't Disappear
Wayback Machine and Google Archive Billions of Pages, Including Deleted Ones
Earlier this year, executives at Dell Inc. tried to shut down DellComputersSuck.com, a Web site promoting an obscure brand of computers. Dell's lawyers dispatched a stern letter, and within a few days, the site's owner revamped it into an online discussion group about computers. The old version disappeared from view.
The PC giant still wanted to seize the address, a move permitted under rules governing the use of domain names. But Dell had to prove to an arbitration panel it had been used in "bad faith." So Dell's legal team turned to the Wayback Machine, a massive archive of Web pages dating back nine years. There, Dell found copies of the deleted site and was able to prove that its owner, Innervision Web Solutions, had used it to redirect consumers to another Web address selling PCs with names such as ZMachinez and Jetbook. In May, an arbitration panel ordered the domain name be transferred to Dell.
The Web, seemingly one of the most ephemeral of media, is instead starting to leave permanent records. Through the Wayback Machine, and similar services offered by companies such as Google Inc., it's now easy to retrieve all kinds of online material, from defunct Web pages to old versions of sites. While these databases have caught on among historians and scholars, they are proving particularly enticing for lawyers.
Fascinating. It's not just business law either -- the archives were instrumental in a murder case:
Archive tools played a pivotal role in a February trial of three teenagers accused of murdering a 12-year-old Toronto boy. The prosecution's star witness was a teenage girl who had taped a phone call in which one of the accused bragged about the murder plan before it was committed. She testified that she found his obsessions with blood and gore immature. The defense argued that the boy was only trying to impress her.
After the case was handed to the jury, a reporter for Canada's National Post reported that the girl had posted comments on a Web site for vampire enthusiasts in which she said her "likes" included blood, pain, drugs and knives. The postings had been removed from the original site and the reporter found them using Google Cache and the Wayback Machine. The report prompted the judge to declare a mistrial on the grounds that the witness's credibility had been damaged.
Dennis Lenzin, an attorney for another of the defendants, says the defense "was completely taken aback" by the postings. He says he researched the girl online using only Yahoo Inc.'s search engine and didn't know of the archives' existence. The case "is a warning shot" for all lawyers, he says.
