Web site sued: For Controversial Trip into Internet Past

摘要

Cyberspace doesn't give its travelers much room for reflection. Every day, millions of Web sites are updated, and older versions are erased from existence with the click of a button. Remember when Amazon.com sold only books? Or when WebCrawler ruled the search universe? The Wayback Machine does. Wayback grabs these pieces of history before they disappear and puts them into a virtual Internet museum for historians, academics, and nostalgics to browse. Founded by Brewster Kahle, an early Web archiving pioneer, the Wayback Machine is a part of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving data, texts, audio, Web sites, and other digital materials since the early days of the online revolution. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been sending out automated crawlers to all corners of the Internet and collecting digital, archived copies of everything they encounter, making pages searchable in three dimensions by URL and date. Archived collections allow users to see how the Web looked during important historical moments such as the 2000 presidential election or September 11, 2001, as well as critical technological junctures, such as the first Web page devoted to a streaming Web cam (the Trojan Room Coffee Machine) or an ancient version of eBay. Now, however, this nonprofit digital museum is embroiled in a lawsuit that has the potential to decide how we'll be able to look back at the Internet from the future.