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Information Requests

The Internet Archive's Policy for Responding to Information Requests

The following sets forth the Internet Archive's policy with regard to requests for documents or other records for use in legal proceedings. Please also read our frequently asked questions in their entirety for additional information.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to archiving the Internet and other digital materials, and providing public access to these records. We are not in the business of responding to requests for affidavits, or authenticating pages or other information from the Wayback Machine; this is why we make our collections available at no cost via our Web site, http://www.archive.org. As a nonprofit, our resources are limited, and these kinds of requests are a significant drain on our time and funds. Please remember that an affidavit from the Internet Archive may not be necessary.

Before asking the Internet Archive to authenticate your documents, we ask that you please seek judicial notice or simply ask your opposing party to stipulate to the documents' authenticity. Of course, the best source of such information is the party who posted the information on the URLs at issue, and the second-best source of such information is someone who actually accessed the historical versions of the URLs.

However, if you are determined to obtain an affidavit authenticating printouts from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we will do our best to help you in accordance with this policy.

To initiate your request, you must send us payment as described below and an electronic list of the extended URLs for each page you would like us to print out. By extended URL, we are referring to the full URL that appears in the Address field of your Web browser when you are looking at the page in question (e.g., http://web.archive.org/web/19970126045828/http://www.archive.org/). If you want more than one page from a particular domain, you must supply the extended URL for each page. Due to the undue burden on our limited resources, we cannot respond to requests for all linked pages at some particular domain. The list of extended URLs should be emailed to info at archive dot org. Please include your contact information in your email.

Our standard fee is $250 per request, plus $20 for each extended URL therein, excepting URLs that contain downloadable/printable files. Any such URLs (for example, .pdfs, .docs., or .txts) instead cost $30 per extended URL. The Internet Archive does not automatically notarize the affidavit. If you would like your affidavit notarized there is an additional $100 fee.

We can only accept payment by check, which should be payable to the Internet Archive, or by means of PayPal. Our PayPal account is at http://www.archive.org/donate/index.php - it is important to include a note with a PayPal transaction indicating that payment is for an "affidavit request" (you may need to click "Add Special Instructions for Recipient" before confirming your transaction to leave such a note). Please note that you must pay us up front; we will not begin working on your request until payment in full is received as well as all of the paper and digital request. Both are needed to have us start on your request. This policy is necessary because a number of requestors have not paid the Internet Archive after receiving our responses. The Internet Archive's mailing/shipping address is:

Internet Archive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118

When you submit payment, please make sure that the Internet Archive can readily identify the request to which your payment relates. For example, if you send a check, include a copy of your request in the envelope with the check. If you send payment via PayPal, email info at archive dot org immediately after sending payment letting the Internet Archive know that you just sent payment and identifying your request.

The Internet Archive will provide printed pages and a standard affidavit of authenticity. We require five business days from receipt of payment to turn around most requests. Requests for especially large numbers of URLs may take longer or we may contact you and ask that you limit your request. Errors contained in your request will also delay the process. Please be patient so we can fix these errors for you.

If you would like us to send you the documents and affidavit by FedEx, please provide us with a FedEx account number. If we do not receive a FedEx number, we will send the documents by regular mail. We do not fax results.

Unless otherwise specified, all requests will be printed using the Firefox browser. If you would rather have the results printed from Internet Explorer or Safari browsers, please make that clear in the request.

Our policy is to respond to reasonable requests within these parameters. We reserve the right to refuse any request that we deem to be unreasonable, and may require you to reimburse other costs we incur as a result of your request.

Thank you for your cooperation.



Frequently Asked Questions