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Comment by akeck | Hacker News Reader

I worry about archive.org's long term health, if people continue posting clearly under-copyright media. If I recall correctly, they operate on a fairly limited budget, so defending one mega-lawsuit could kill them. They don't have technical or legal resources that Google leverages to manage such content on YouTube.

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Are they at risk of copyright infringement? I thought I'd seen the rights reverted to Burke himself. At one point I had a youtube subscription to a channel of all the episodes that was posted by James Burke. Felt like his interest was in making them permanently available, not in making money.

It's possible there's something exceptional about Connections, but in general there's a lot of copyrighted material on there. It's a real problem if you're looking for genuinely public domain stuff. I'm not sure how archive.org would go about fixing this though.

I don't know about this particular issue, but the Internet Archive actually has a special exemption from the DMCA for bypassing copyright protection in the games it holds. It's actually designated a library in California and no doubt has a few lawyers who would happily represent them if something untoward happens.

Most likely, at worst, the Archive will be notified that it can't host the material and take it down (and I strongly suspect that Burke wouldn't do that). I find it hard to think there will be any major assault on it after all these years and it's long-standing reputation.

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