evidence from wayback

from boing boing:

The Internet Archive contains billions of snapshots of web-pages on different days since 1996. Using its 'Wayback Machine,' you can get the archive to show you what any page looked like on a day when it was copied by the archive's crawler.

So it was only a matter of time before the a page from the Archive would be used in a court proceeding to prove something about some date in history. It's happened, and the court has admitted the Archive's pages into evidence.

Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska's assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska's objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.