Extract from Hanzo’s article “What Courts and Regulators Look For in a Web Archive, and What Makes One Hold Up”
Are Screenshots Admissible as Evidence of Website Content?
A screenshot of a website can be admitted as evidence, but it requires a witness to authenticate it: someone who can testify to when it was taken, from which environment, by whom, and that the file has not been altered since. The screenshot itself carries none of that information. It is a rendered image of one visible state of a page at the moment of capture, with no embedded proof of its own timing or integrity.
For a client-facing financial disclosure page, those omissions carry a practical cost. If the page changed between capture and inquiry, an undocumented timestamp leaves the responding team unable to show which version a customer saw on the date in question. The authentication burden then falls on whoever made the capture, often months or years later, reconstructing the circumstances from memory.
How Is a Web Archive Authenticated Under FRE 902?
Since December 2017, Federal Rules of Evidence 902(13) and 902(14) allow electronic records to be admitted as self-authenticating, replacing foundation witness testimony with a written certification from a qualified person.
