Slashdot | The Wayback Machine, Friend or Foe? What's an archive, as opposed to a violation of copyright and/or privacy? The other issue here is that the wayback machine is not perfect - one of the sites I've worked on has old versions incorrectly stored (images with the same name but different content stuffing up a template, for instance). The side of this argument that rarely gets a mention is the historical record aspect - historians have to make do with whatever record of life has survived from a certain era. If you let the net slip by without keeping anything, then you let a revolutionary communication medium go the way of the Dark Ages.

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