Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Lavallee Looks At 301works.org

Brewster Kahle, John Borthwick, and I were interviewed last week for WSJ piece that was published this week:

[via Trying to Save the Web’s Shortcuts by Andrew Lavallee]

“If one of these organizations were to go away, then it’s like part of the whole Web going dark,” says Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that makes backups of Web sites through its Wayback Machine.

The archiving project has implications for the legal profession. The Wayback Machine is used by lawyers to look at sites on a particular date, and shortened links could increasingly be called on as well, making their stability a key issue.

“If you have a shortened URL, and the trail ends there, you may have a dead end,” says Daren Orzechowski, a partner at White & Case LLP.

For example, a defamation suit might hinge on a Web site that a plaintiff links to in an email, said Jonathan Pink, an attorney at Bryan Cave LLP. “You have to go to the link to get the defamation,” he said. “If the link is now broken, then you can’t really prove your case.”

Concerns about the longevity of start-ups that provide shortened Web addresses was sparked in August when one service, Tr.im, said it it would close its doors. It has since changed its plans.

“Many of these companies are likely to go out of business,” says Stowe Boyd, director of the archiving project, dubbed 301Works.

Link-shortening services exist in a crowded, revenue-challenged space. Most are offered free to consumers, though a few are ad-supported or sell premium options such as customized URLs. The market is also dominated by Bit.ly, the default shortener on Twitter, and TinyURL, which started in 2002.

Actually, the legal implications of a short URL had not occurred to me.

The notion that many URL shorteners are likely to set up shop and fail, later, is fairly obvious. For example, if a dozen photo sharing services are created, and each offers URL shortening as an aspect of their service, a natural fallout will lead to more than half going away. Note that this example, where photos are being stored as served as well, offers an additional area where the Internet Archive might get involved, since 301works.org is only focused on the URLs at this time, not storing objects that may be referenced by the URLs.

And to clarify: I am the director of 301works.org, which is an initiative of Internet Archive, as well as being a working group of the companies participating.