Tricks and Tools: Way Back Machine and WhoIs Records — Handy Tools to Find Information re: Online Enforcement

For budding lawyers envisaging a career in IP law practice as well as young practitioners out there, particularly those who are currently involved or those who’re going to be involved in online enforcement activities, here are a couple of online tools that you’d find handy to look for relevant information and details while conducting online enforcement of your clients’ intellectual property rights.

Way Back Machine

Suppose you’ve been asked to work on a matter in which some content that infringes your client’s trademark or copyright was uploaded on the alleged infringer’s website. You’ve sent out a legal notice and the other party takes down the content. Then for some reason the other party uploads the infringing content again with some modifications. You send out another legal notice and it is taken down just to be put up again in some other altered yet still infringing manner! The cycle would go on . . . In case you’ve missed out on saving screenshots of this website at any instance or if you wish to see how this website looked in the past in order to conclusively establish non-cooperation and mala fide conduct on part of such a party, you’d want to have access to prior snap shots that could tell you how this website looked at a given point in time in the past.

Similarly, in case you want to establish your client’s prior rights in a given mark by virtue of prior use of the mark on your client’s website; but this website of your client does not use that mark any more, you’ll need time-stamped snap shots of your client’s website to establish how the website looked at a given point in time in the past.

There’s a simple solution to the problem posed by the above-two situations. It’s called “Way Back Machine”. As the name suggests this tool takes you back in time and allows you access how a website/webpage looked at a particular point in time. Here’s what you have to do.

Step 1:

Go to https://archive.org/web/.

You’ll see to following screen.

Step 2:

In the text field next the words Wayback Machine Internet Archive, copy the URL of the website/webpage for which you need such snap shots. Click Browse History or press enter. Now you’ll see the following screen.

Step 3:

As you can see, here is a calendar with markings on saved screenshots on particular dates. Click on the one you’d like to see and there you go! You can now, as if you were back in time, access how a website looked in the past.

You can save this screenshot now and with the help of it, establish the other party’s conduct and/or your client’s prior use of a mark or any other fact that can be so established, as the case may be.

WhoIs Records

In practice, you’ll also come across a lot of instances, wherein the infringement of your client’s rights is taking place online on a given website or webpage and you have trouble accessing some pertinent details such as who owns/runs this domain name?; when was this web page last updated?; when did this website/webpage start? and so on and so forth.

To get answers to these questions and to find out some other details regarding the impugned domain name, here’s what you can do.

Step 1:

Go to https://whois.domaintools.com/. You’ll see the following screen.

Step 2: Copy the URL for which you wish to access the above-noted information. Press enter.

Step 3: Validate that you’re not a robot and you’ll be able to access the information you need. For instance WhoIs records of www.facebook.com are as follows.

As you can see the information includes registration organization, registrant country as well dates of creation, expiry and last update. Such information is pretty useful while dealing IP matters of several types such online copyright and trademark infringement.

These are a simple and effective tools that are frequently used in practice. This bloke believes that having knowledge and experience with these will help you get an edge in practice and will surely save you some time and trouble.

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The author can be contacted at amayxaviers@gmail.com.