Psycho Sensei

Healthcare Advocates -- The Incredible "Lawyers as Hackers" Case:


You may have read about the unusual case where a law firm was sued for going to the Internet Archive and printing out some pages it found there, to use as evidence in a case.
They won the case, but then they were accused by the loser of copyright infringement, "hacking" or a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and violating the DMCA by bypassing a robots.txt file.

The case is Healthcare Advocates v. Harding, Earley Folley & Frailey et al. In its Second Amended Complaint [PDF], Healthcare Advocates alleged that the Harding firm violated their copyright rights in four specific ways: by unlawfully displaying archived screenshots and viewing the images returned by the Wayback Machine on their computers in their offices. Yes. For real. It's in the complaint, paragraph 79. The second copyright infringement, according to Healthcare was that the firm unlawfully reproduced the archived images by knowingly storing copies of the screenshots onto their computer hard drives. That turned out to be false in any case, because the paralegal temp that did the work didn't save anything to the hard drive. She only printed out whatever she found.

The third alleged violation was that the firm unlawfully reproduced copyrighted images by printing paper copies of the archived screenshots off of their computers. And finally, paragraph 82 alleges that the firm unlawfully distributed copies of the screenshots to their co-counsel in the lawsuit it won. Oh, and they were accused of spoliating evidence, because they didn't preserve cache files. Poor Internet Archive got dragged into the litigation for a while, too.

Can you believe this? Healthcare Advocates, the plaintiff, had set up a robots.txt file to block the public from viewing their old website pages, you see, but for some reason it didn't work for a few days, and so the defendant law firm was able to view and print out legacy pages from Wayback for a client in litigation with Healthcare. Their reward for this normal and simple act was a very persistent and complicated lawsuit.

Last month, the defendant law firm finally won a motion for summary judgment, dismissing all of the plaintiffs' claims, including the claims for copyright infringement. Here's the judge's memorandum and order [PDF]. I'll provide it as text also.

Now there is more news about the case. The victorious defendant law firm has just asked the court to order the plaintiffs to pay its legal fees and costs. It's a whopping $161,461.50 for the former and $9,348.60 for the latter. You can read the memorandum of law [PDF] asking for the fees and costs to be reimbursed.