Two parties in a breach of contract action dispute the terms and conditions of an online auction. An archived webpage of the terms is available on the Wayback Machine, a publicly available online archive that preserves and stores copies of websites captured at specific dates and times—"a digital library of Internet sites"—run by the nonprofit Internet Archive (see https://archive.org/about/). In a bench trial, the defendant asks the court to take judicial notice of the archived webpage's contents on the premise that the Wayback Machine is a source whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned. (Judicial notice is defined generally as a court's acceptance of the truth of a matter without formal evidentiary proof.) May the court take judicial notice of an archived webpage from the Wayback Machine, or must the defendant offer evidence authenticating the webpage before it may be admitted into evidence?

Recently, in Weinhoffer v. Davie Shoring, 23 F.4th 579 (5th Cir. 2022), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided this question for the first time and ruled against taking judicial notice. The court held that the Wayback Machine's archived webpages are not a proper subject of judicial notice "because a private internet archive falls short of being a source whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned as required by [Federal Rule of Evidence] Rule 201."