XagferI wrote:

Well duh. The question here is, Disney, and pretty much any megacorporation, is not going to be around forever.

and what makes you believe IA will be around forever? The kind of thing this thread is pointing out bring up issues that could jeopardize its 'reasons' for exemptions and close the archive.

leileilol wrote:

XagferI wrote:

Well duh. The question here is, Disney, and pretty much any megacorporation, is not going to be around forever.

and what makes you believe IA will be around forever? The kind of thing this thread is pointing out bring up issues that could jeopardize its 'reasons' for exemptions and close the archive.

It's also bringing up reasons that make me want to lock this thread. 😁

kreats wrote:

But nobody is paying for old software to be archived.. hence distributing is the cheapest way of archiving it. Last I saw, the internet archive is a bunch of servers in a church - this is too fragile to rely upon.

You're just trying to justify intellectual property theft. Distributing what you don't have a right to distribute is a crime, your motivation for doing so is irrelevant to the courts. If you're going to make an archive, then keep it to yourself.

collector wrote:

dr_st wrote:

I am not sure about this, but I'm under the impression that if the copyright holder ceases to exist, and there is no agreement in place to inherit the rights, then the works fall into the public domain. Is that not the case?

If a corporation goes under somebody will buy the assets, so this is very rare. It may be that the actual IP holder may not even know all that they own. When ScummVM adds support for a new game this often involves tracking down the IP holder. Sometimes this can take a fair bit of research.

And some games or software may have multiple copyright holders, so you would have to track them all down and get their consent and if just one refuses, you're out of luck. That's why when a game like Rock-N-Roll racing is released to the public domain, they have to remove the original soundtrack. Blizzard didn't own the rights to the songs, they got consent from the copyright holders to feature the songs in the game when it was new, and that agreement has long since expired. Apple has some versions of it's old operating systems on their website for download, but not all of them. The ones that are missing are ones that contain code that Apple licensed and the license has expired. That's why you can get MacOS 7.5.5 but not 7.6.1. 7.6.1 relies on code that Apple does not own and they're not going to pay for a new license for something they are going to give away for free.

leileilol wrote:

and what makes you believe IA will be around forever? The kind of thing this thread is pointing out bring up issues that could jeopardize its 'reasons' for exemptions and close the archive.

Of course. The Internet in general is more fragile than any physical medium, because its existence depends on having access to several computer locations through connections that have many points of failure. Not to mention the costs of maintaining servers.

What I really wanted to do was to make you all think and form conclusions on your own, and not blindly accept the current laws of today, because I got that impression from some of the posts here. With that said, I realize that there is very little which justifies stealing entertainment for your own enjoyment.

As for the exception from DMCA, I know that it's only supposed to apply to old arcade games and not to most of the games put there, and before they changed the website's looks I remember them being more strict about what they would host.

If the same standards applied to electronic material as applied to books (obligation for the rights holder to legally deposit a copy at an archive and provide lending rights through a public institution) - I'd be fully satisfied.

e.g.

https://www.nla.gov.au/legal-deposit

IIRC, Jason Scott was talking about a project about backing up the IA about 2+ months ago.....and that they'd already backed up X amount of terabytes. Can't remember the details but google has 'em.

leileilol wrote:

XagferI wrote:

Well duh. The question here is, Disney, and pretty much any megacorporation, is not going to be around forever.

and what makes you believe IA will be around forever? The kind of thing this thread is pointing out bring up issues that could jeopardize its 'reasons' for exemptions and close the archive.

Internet Archive distributes copyrighted material, The Pirate Bay distributes copyrighted material. What's the difference between them?

The only difference is that The Pirate Bay is peer to peer while Internet Archive uses the model that Napster used to use of hosting files directly on their server which they had to change after they were taken to court and lost. If Napster wasn't allowed to do what Internet Archive is doing, then why should Internet Archive be allowed?

If The Pirate Bay needs to go for their copyright infringement activities, then so should Internet Archive.

sliderider wrote:

The only difference is that The Pirate Bay is peer to peer while Internet Archive uses the model that Napster used to use of hosting files directly on their server which they had to change after they were taken to court and lost.

I'm not sure what you mean, because Napster was also peer-to-peer. Napster did have centralized servers to which peers would connect, but Napster did not host files themselves (unless you're referring to the services which later operated under the name of Napster). Back then they could have never possibly been able to afford the server load otherwise.

Also, like I mentioned before, the Internet Archive does seem to have some sort of special exemption.
https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

Because the IA is a non profit with noble goals that is fulfilling a necessary role wholly abandoned by both the private and public sectors?

illegal is Illegal. If you want to do something illegal thats your business. But we don't need to hear it. That why this site has a disclaimer.

And on that note, locking thread.