Re:Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive
by ghaff on Monday April 17, 2017 @09:51AM
(#14130837)
More generally, the Internet Archive does a bunch of things that make it harder/uninteresting to pursue for copyright issues.
1.) That you list is a big one. With respect to websites, the ability to change robots.txt goes a long way toward creating an assumption of ownership even retroactively.
2.) The IA is non-commercial.
3.) The IA doesn't have deep pockets.
Add it all up and although much of what the IA does archive is in a pretty murky legal area, the fact that it's willing to take most things down and that there isn't a big payday to be gained from suing them, leaves them mostly free to do what they do.
1) Disable access to works upon request, but only after challenging the requesting party to substantiate the claim that they represent the actual copyright owner. Apparently, a whole goddamn lot of copyrights have hazy ownership thanks to corporate mergers/dissolutions/reorganizations being messy, but the claimed owners are rarely called on it. I suppose the implicit promise is that IA would demand the same in a lawsuit.
2) Only allow access to some works via "streaming", e.g. running a game in an in-browser emulator at archive.org but not providing download links. Of course a technically savvy user can retrieve the underlying files, but this purportedly puts it under the legal framework of "broadcasting" rather than "copying", which is supposed to somehow limit legal remedies available to copyright owners.