Distributed archiving feels like oral tradition. I'm smiling.
French police recently raided the infrastructure of such a place, and now it's gone. It was around for 8 years.
Who knows, maybe users will organize in a different way to make an more legal repository of music.
Legally, that's irrelevant (except maybe for calculating damages). Publicly available content is just as copyrighted, and paid content may be in the public domain (e.g. printed copies of Oliver Twist).
Barring an explicit license, one can't copy any content on any website, except for simply displaying it (there's an implicit license). And you certainly can't re-distribute it.
There are exceptions (books and videos) but I assume they are negotiated with rights owners.
Why do you assume that, when anyone can upload them?
https://archive.org/details/HarryPotterAndTheCursedChild_201...
I'll also assume that it's as easy to upload copyrighted material than it is to remove them for the rights owner.
You're totally right about the license of publicly available content. I handwaved over it, assuming that people still wouldn't mind backup by a tier as long as it doesn't damage them (and again I'll assume archive.org accepts removal when demanded... which I'm gonna check right now).
pse: https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Rights
https://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Movies (search for Who owns the rights to these movies?)
I may have allegedly been a pirate years ago. And I may have allegedly spent a lot of time at various abandonware sites because I like older games. And those sites seemed great. They had strict rules on what could and could not be uploaded and very much took the approach of "this is an archive". Then GoG launched and made it reasonable to buy those older games in a format that would (usually) work on modern systems.
Great right? We won! Nope. All four of the sites I used to (allegedly) frequent had responses ranging from "They aren't the creators so we are still going to let you upload these files" to "Some of our uploads are in iso format so it is still required". Hell, one even allowed people to upload the gog installers.
I am mostly good with archive.org (I have some reservations but feel them to be a net good), but my general experience is that most "archive" sites tend to just be pirates who think they understand the legal system.
The Internet Archive worked closely with What.cd to archive the metadata that was painstakingly maintained there. They may even have snatched the perfect FLACs, and are shipping them offshore, so they can be made available when and if the US allows things to enter the public domain again.