The Wayback Machine

Has the web page you are looking for disappeared? Are you nostalgic for an older version of your favorite web site? Has an item important to that case you’ve been working on been removed from a particular web page? Then try turning to The Wayback Machine.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine enables you to see what a particular web site looked like at some time in the past. It allows you to visit and surf over 85 billion web pages which have been archived from 1996 to a few months ago. This includes audio, video, and live music, in addition to text. If you have a URL to start with, just type it into the web search box and click on "Take Me Back".  Advanced Search allows you to specify date ranges and file types. You can browse the archive of web pages as well.

Using the Wayback Machine and other internet archives is becoming common practice in many areas of legal research. Intellectual property lawyers, for example, have been using them to find old web sites to show that their clients’ trademarks or domain names have been misused, and archived web sites are increasingly being used as evidence in other cases as well, including family law matters and product liability cases. If you would like to read more about the use of archived web sites in legal cases, check out the following articles:

J. Fusaris