Regarding my previous post, covering Judge Hedges decision:
I think it is important to recognise that while Judge Hedges is absolutely right from a legal perspective, it doesn’t automatically follow from a technical perspective. This needs some explaining.
Websites are compound, complex, interconnected and hyperlinked collections of compound, complex, interconnected and hyperlinked documents. Lots of moving parts (and syllables).
This is quite different to other ESI. Consider, for example, an electronic file, such as a word or excel document, corresponds to a single document; an email is an envelope containing a single message, with metadata and attachments. A web-based document on the other hand, more often than not consists of many files: an html page, javascript code, style sheet(s), images, embedded media (possibly streaming), and links to different parts of the html file, other html files or documents, or other websites. Websites are not the same!
At the human level, Courts view web-based documents the same as your average human reader, i.e. the compound document described above, not the individual component parts. To preserve such documents in their native form, it is necessary to collect all the components parts correctly and store each and all of them unchanged.
As such, file-oriented methods for preservation are clearly inappropriate for websites.
