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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone how the Internet Archive get a bypass on DMCA? It's full of pirated games for example. I'm aware that it's one thing to archive something but anyone can download it as well, so it's essentially distribution too. Just curious how does it work. Personally that's how I get old SNES, NES, DS games.

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The IA actually has a DMCA exemption for the pirated games: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

Not so sure about that, their big Amiga collection lasted couple of days.

Specifically, the part of the DMCA that the exemption is for is the part that makes it criminal to bypass copy-protection; it does not grant them additional rights to make or distribute copies.

There are lots of forms of copying where the copying itself is legal under copyright law. However, the DMCA made it criminal to bypass copy-protection mechanisms, even if they copying itself would otherwise be legal. That's what the exception was for.

Pretty sure that temporary exemption expired and was not renewed.

The exemption was renewed in 2006 and in 2010 (the would-be-2009 decision was delivered late), but was not renewed in 2012.

That said, the exemption was to allow legally bypassing the copy-protection mechanisms; that were preventing otherwise-legal copying. Once they bypassed the mechanism to get a non-copy-protected copy in 2003-2012, they may continue distributing copies of it now, since the act of copying was/is legal; it's the act of breaking the DRM that is once again forbidden.

Distributing copyright works without a license is usually infringing though.

I'm not familiar with the details, but it is my understanding that their status as a library helps a lot with that side of it.

> to be valid until the next Copyright Office rulemaking in 2006

It seems that the ruling might be a few years out of date?

They don't, they take things down if they get a notice, but the majority of their stuff is out of publish, and the company that published it is defunct or doesn't care at this point.

I feel like this can't be the whole truth? I wouldn't, for example, start reprinting bestsellers and merely stop when asked. Imposing an opt-out system on others isn't really how copyright works.

The DMCA safe harbor provisions give middlemen/service providers some protections. So long as they are storing things at someone else’s direction and comply with takedown requests, they are protected from most copyright claims. This protection doesn’t extend to the person that provided archive.org the content originally.

You're stretching the analogy in a whole bunch of ways. They're hosting old, out of print games, not the latest Call of Duty best seller. And the DMCA has a 'D' at the front, because it's different when content is digital, otherwise it'd just be 'copyright'. The DMCA explicitly allows for this method of operation: the Internet Archive, like HN or Reddit or IG or YouTube is a neutral 3rd party, hosting content that users provide. As long as they take that content down when legally notified appropriately of a copyright claim, then the DMCA explicitly says they're good to go. And as another user metioned, the games specifically have an exemption/carveout codified in law: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-exemptio...

>and the company that published it is defunct or doesn't care at this point.

Nintendo? They are hard on shutting down ROM sites yet almost all of their catalog is up on IA

Didn't IA go through the bother to legally become a library, allowing all kinds of digital lending?

The last time this came up on HN, I was able to find the information. But it doesn't Google doesn't seem to want to share any information with me about it right now. Maybe because it's older than six minutes.

You could consider using a certain little known libre encyclopedia for your searches:

> was officially designated as a library by the state of California in 2007.[notes 6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Operations

I'd be happy if it had a copy of IBM Support Console Application 1.6.1 or 1.6.2 for OS/2 from 1999 or so, but alas.

The Internet Archive are a registered library.

Their About page talks around this though doesn't address the point specifically. It's the best reference I can come up with right now:

https://archive.org/about/

They don't. They do this with their Great 78 project as well. The way they go about borrowing collections, digitizing them, then returning them (which in itself is illegal reproduction), and then posting them online (also breaking copyright laws), is very sketchy. In in addition it is frustrating to watch (I hesitate to say "unfair") them do this when, say, university or publicly funded archives cannot get away with doing the same and are much more constrained in their methods. There is a whole other can of worms to do with long term sustainability and preservation but I won't get into that

It's not "sketchy". Their DMCA page explains it and they respond to DMCAs with validity.

Now Youtube and their in-house pseudo DMCA is sketchy.

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