This is absolutely amazing. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s simply spectacular.
I punched in http://www.straightdope.com and was met with about 40 dates, which show what The Straight Dope looked like dating back to 1997. Pretty cool.
Gee, do you think I could download that onto this floppy? 
Seriously! How much space do you think all of that takes up? It’s not like it’s only a screenshot of each site ever created, the links are actually clickable (to an extent).
Not sure how this works, however I put in my companies homepage and was rewared with a couple of gifs and nothing else. I wonder If this is because it only saved the index page, which was a frame set.
I punched in one of my sites and for many of the dates they have the same page.
Less than impressive, but a cute concept.
Although I suspect archiving others copyrighted materials is a dangerous game for them to be playing.
They probably do like the Swedish national library, The Royal Library, in Stockholm has been doing for years. They have a special program, a spider, that travels the web following all links, downloading everything it finds for the benefit of future researchers.
They’re aware of this issue, though perhaps don’t have any good answers. See this Salon article.
There is a pretty good discussion of the Way Back Machine in the Personal Law Forum at: http://www.delphi.com/perlaw
Pretty much the conclusion is that it may be neat, but it is illegal as hell and they’ll be sued into oblivion.
Well, nice to know my publisher’s instincts are still strong.
Playing with someone else’s copyright is a no-no. A big one.
I wouldn’t want to try to defend it. Not in a million years.
Whoops. This was posted friggin’ yesterday. I need to start reading more threads.