The Internet Archive (including the Wayback Machine) basically exists in a legal Gray area (to be generous) that has mostly depended on not doing things (or undoing things) that caught someone's attention who was willing to actually take some action about it. For the most part, the IA doesn't have any more special status than you or I if we were to mirror someone's website or create a comic strip museum.

A lot of what they make available arguably shouldn't be protected by copyright under a rational copyright regime but that's an argument to make to Congress rather than saying the IA can do whatever feels justified to them. (Which can cut both ways once you say the law is whatever you personally think is fair.)

The IA has been skating on thin ice for a long time. They’ve archived a ton of content I generated over the years, most of it copyrighted. In my case I don’t care, I actually appreciate it since I didn’t keep archives as well as I should and occasionally use IA to find my own stuff. Also, my content is worth approximately 25¢. Others are not so forgiving.

What we really need are updated copyright laws that allow for research and preservation. However, people have been calling for updated laws for decades, but powerful copyright holders have stood in the way, so don’t hold your breath.

>In my case I don’t care

If you did, you could DMCA claim it. They'd still archive the stuff, but it wouldn't be publicly available until whenever it'd fall into the public domain. That part of the system seems to work fairly well, except the century it would take for it to fall into public domain.

You probably don't even need to make a DMCA claim. Probably just ask them to take it down. That's pretty much how the IA has operated in general. Mostly just act as if most people don't care (which they don't) and, for most other cases, take any requested actions because it's easier for both sides than a lawsuit.

The important part of the DMCA claim is that you state under threat of perjury that you either own the copyright or are a representative of whomever owns the copyright. That's why they'd probably want a DMCA claim or some other verification you owned the copyright on what you want taken down.

100% agree with this. The biggest issue seems to be that they make no visible effort to find and disable user-uploaded copyright content, so it's effectively a free-for-all file sharing site. A lot of the cases are especially egregious because the uploading user will give the content an invalid "license" like CC0 that they have no right to apply.

I picked three random pieces of recent copyright content (Adobe Lightroom, the video game Hollow Knight, the Taylor Swift album "Folklore"), and I found all of them easily and trivially on the Internet Archive. In fact I found hacked versions of the entire Adobe CC suite. The IA is at least as complete a source for pirated content as most public bittorrent trackers.

Officially, of course, the Internet Archive is subject to DMCA safe harbor protections. This is user uploaded content, and so long as IA responds quickly to takedown notices, they're in the clear. But this story represents the situation de jure, not de facto. Ever since Viacom v. YouTube, it's been abundantly clear that even the biggest online platforms can't use this excuse in practice when sharing of copyright IP becomes rampant. YouTube put in the first version of their much maligned "Content ID" system the year after the Viacom lawsuit, and the parties settled out of court after YouTube lost at the circuit court level. [1]

I don't believe that the Internet Archive, as a much smaller entity, is likely to see a significantly different outcome - that is, unless the lawsuits manage to bankrupt them entirely. This would suggest they need to be much more proactive about removing or disabling access to copyright content on the platform.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

They were flaunting copyright laws with books even more egregiously and lost that suit. I think the IA is a deeply important project and wish they'd stop picking these fights.

Picking these fights is part of the mission, universal access to all knowledge requires pushing boubdaries and changing the law.

I think people shouldn't leave rakes littered all over the ground. Perhaps by stepping on them I'll demonstrate why it's a bad idea, but I'll also probably take a couple thwacks to the head in the meantime.

I mean if the rakes are government mandated and the public needs convincing to change the mandate, sure