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'Web 2.0' as evidence

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Jamie
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'Web 2.0' as evidence

by Sean McLinden

In a recent intellectual property case for which we were retained, among the electronically stored information (ESI) that the plaintiff sought for production were internal company blogs and wikis used by the defendant’s developers to discuss new product ideas, as well as the design and coding of the alleged offending application. Included in the discovery were sites created using Microsoft® SharePoint® and MediaWiki software (and others). The discovery order was crafted with the typical “readily accessible” and “native format” language that seems totally irrelevant to sites which maintain dynamic content.

Due to the nature of the business, none of the sites for which production was requested was required to be managed in accordance with standards for business compliance such as Sarbanes-Oxley or the European Union Data Protection Directive. All were informal sites created by the development team to support collaboration with other team members. It is arguable whether there was any affirmative “duty to preserve” since it appeared that the developers were totally unaware of any intellectual property concerns related to their work.

Thus, the issues that arose during production were two-fold What constituted “readily accessible” in sites in which the content is frequently changing and for which point-in-time recovery (PiTR) solutions do not exist?

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