I'd like to imagine a world where every lawyer, when their case is helped by a Wayback Machine snapshot of something, flips a few bucks to IA. They could afford a world-class admin team in no time flat.
replies(2):
If the state of a webpage in the past matters to you, you need a record that won't cease to exist when your opposition asks it to. This is the concept behind perma.cc.
* it prevents victims from performing discovery (gathering evidence) before starting a trial or confiding to an expensive lawyer whose loyalty may turn out to systematically lie with the perpetrators or highest bidders.
* it prevents people who requested a snapshot (and thus know a specific URL with relevant knowledge) from proving their version of events to acquaintances, say during or after a court case in the event their lawyers just spin a random story instead of submitting the evidence as requested, since disloyal lawyer will have informed counterparty and counterparties will have requested "removal" of the page at IA, resulting in psychological isolation of the victim since victim can no longer point to the pages with direct and or supporting evidence.
Anyone with even basic understanding of cryptographic hashes and signatures would understand that:
1) for a tech-savvy entity (which an internet archival entity automatically is expected to be)
2) in the face changing norms and values (regardless of static or changing laws: throughout history violations were systematically turned a blind eye to)
3) given the shameless nature of certain entities, self-describing their criminal behavior on their commercial webpages
Any person understanding above 3 points concludes that such an archival company can impossibly assume some imaginary "middle ground" between:
A) Defender of truth and evidence, freedom fighter, human rights activist, so that humanity can learn from mistakes and crimes
or
B) Status quomplicit opressor of evidence
Because any imaginary hypothetical "middle ground" entity would quickly be inundated by legal requests for companies hiding their suddenly permanently visible crimes, and simultaneously for reinstantiations by victims pleading public access to the evidence.
Once we know its either A or B, and recalling point "tech savvy" (point 1), we can summarily conclude that a class A archival entity would helpfully assist victims as follows: don't just provide easy page archival buttons, but also provide attestations: say zip files of the pages, with an autogenerated legalese PDF, with hashes of the page and the date of observation, cryptographically signed by the IA. This way a victim can prove to police, lawyers, judges, or in case those locally work against them, prove to friends, family, ... that the IA did in fact see the information and evidence.
I leave it to the reader to locate the attestation package zips for these pages, in order to ascertain that the IA is a class A organization, and not a class B one.