Well, the fine folks over in the Presidio who run the Internet Archive are being sued, along with Philadelphia firm Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey. It seems that the firm used the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" to turn up old webpages from the Healthcare Advocates website (which is kind of like a web design wayback machine) while preparing a trademark infringement defense for their client Health Advocates.

Well, Healthcare Advocates says that the Internet Archive is in violation of that most wonderful of broadly-worded laws, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Their argument is that they told the automated web bots at the Internet Archive to stop scanning the site and to not make cached copies of the site available using robots.txt, and since the defense team in the trademark suit did find old documents via the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive circumvented "technological measures" meant to protect copyrighted material.

The robots.txt file is completely voluntary (bots can, and will, ignore it -- see: spammers), and a ruling in this case could set an interesting precedent -- search engines and the like could potentially be held liable under the DMCA if they spider pages that they shouldn't.

Via BoingBoing and The Legal Reader.