The internets, how do they work?
The already ridiculously old and technologically impaired Supreme Court of the United States of America has come down with a bad case of link rot. The NY Times brings us news of a new study by the Harvard Law School that finds almost half of all hyperlinks referenced in Supreme Court decisions are now defunct. Now what the hell does that actually mean?
Link rot is a phenomenon associated with the World Wide Web pretty much since its inception. What happens is – people like me, write articles like this, and link other people around the web, like this. Then after some time, there are a bunch of things that can happen. Owners of websites move, they quit updating their blog, they don’t pay hosting fees, they move links around within their own site to categorize things better, news sites move archived links behind a paywall. Basically, if a site owner changes any one letter or thing in an address, my link becomes dead. It comes back with a 404 error message, and I look like a shitty writer who didn’t do my research well. Or if it’s years down the road, whoever happened upon my writing gets stuck and can’t fall further down the wiki-hole.
Hyperlinks are convenient though, they’re easy, prevalent, and understood by everyone. I mean seriously, who reads footnotes and citations on the internet anymore? Just put the link in the article. Now the Supreme Court has typically cited physical sources, like books or articles that exist in a physical form in a library. The interesting thing now though, is that the Supreme Court has been citing websites in their opinions, and that’s awesome, until the websites don’t exist anymore. Those footnotes and citations that are so valuable to lawyers just don’t work anymore.
Think about it, the courts of the United States are completely based on precedent and what the Supreme Court of the day meant on their ruling by the opinions. Without having the supporting documentation, it’s pretty damn hard to understand the intent of a decision 10 years from now, much less 100. Justice Scalia linked the Supreme Court’s own damn webpage for a video of a car chase decision. That video is no longer available. After Justice Breyer wrote (in the same case) “I suggest that the interested reader take advantage of the link in the court’s opinion, and watch it,” that link no longer works.
Are you fucking kidding me? There have been roughly 550 Supreme Court citations to links around the web over the past decade. Almost half of them are dead. HALF! In under ten years! Libraries can burn, books can be lost, but 225 items do not just disappear from the world when there is a permanent record of them. The US Supreme Court has access to the fucking Library of Congress. The courts need to act, and make sure that the information is available to future generations and citizens. Link rot is a problem that will not go away, and as time goes on, there will be more and more citations that will be removed, and that makes you think – if the courts can’t buy and maintain one server to keep a screenshot of a webpage and then activate it if the link goes dead, what the hell is the point of going that far in a process?
How can people’s rights actually be defended if 30 years from now all law students see are ERROR 404 pages?
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