Using an online database called the Wayback Machine and archived web pages collected by companies like Google, lawyers are unearthing a wide range of web-based evidence, including websites that no longer exist and old versions of current sites.
Intellectual property lawyers have been using these techniques for a few years to locate old websites that demonstrate that their clients' trademark or domain name has been misused.
But the practice is now expanding into other areas of the law, where archived websites are providing helpful evidence in a host of other cases, including criminal cases, family law matters and product liability cases, among countless others. Attorneys say it's only a matter of time before these tools become commonplace in law offices and courtrooms across the country.
It's a pretty interesting article about how lawyers are using earlier versions of Web pages in court cases and how judges are deciding. There's also a sidebar on the Wayback Machine, which unfortunately doesn’t mention the lawsuit against it for allowing a law firm to access archived copies of a website, which shouldn't have been available, according to company policy. Archive.org's policy is to not allow access to archived Web pages if the URL includes an exclusionary robots.txt file.
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