A Philadelphia company, Healthcare Advocates, posted some information to its web site in 2003. During a subsequent trade secrets dispute with another company, it removed the information from its site and asked the Internet Archive (IA) to block access to its copies of the same information. A Philadelphia law firm later found the information in the IA --whether by ordinary searching or by hacking is still unclear. Now Healthcare Advocates is suing the IA for failing to block the information and suing the Philadelphia law firm for bypassing the IA's blocking technology. A spokesman for the law firm said, "You don't have trade secrets if you're publishing them on the Web...[I]t appears [Healthcare Advocates] published trade 'secrets' on their own Web site, and didn't want anybody to know that." For more details, see Kevin Coughlin, Philadelphia health care advocacy firm sues search-engine operators, Star-Ledger, July 12, 2005 (free registration required).
From the article: 'Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a cyber-liberties group that has represented the Internet Archive in the past, called this the first case to challenge the [IA's] exclusion policy. But he said the claims are so quirky -- amounting to "in-fighting" between law firms --he doubts it will set legal precedents for companies such as Google, which also stores billions of Web pages. Opsahl said he knows of no laws guaranteeing any right to take back Web information once it's published. He added that the doctrine of fair use generally allows the gathering of copyrighted materials as evidence in trade secret cases and other disputes.'
Update. I won't blog all the coverage of this lawsuit. But since the Star-Ledger broke the story, many other newspapers have begun to cover it.
Update. This suit was settled on August 23, 2006. The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/12/2005 03:34:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
