Archives are exempt from being forbidden to create copies due to copyright infringement. The Library of Congress can make all the copies it wants, it just can't SELL them.
Now, there is a question whether a private company should legally be able to BE an archive of record, but as of now there's no legal reason they can't be, I believe. So it's legal.
It turns out that the internet is not always forever. I find that comforting.
"The Internet is forever" isn't some natural law by which all content abides as though it can never disappear. It's a warning that you don't control the content once it's accessible on the Internet.
And requiring an explicit opt-in would basically mean no IA.
To be clear, the IA is a positive, maybe even a great one. But it skirts by because most people don't care. (They did as you say post whatever on the public internet.) Add the facts that they're a non-profit, aren't trying to monetize their hosting, and will generally take things if the owner asks.
Libraries and other archives have some very limited special rights (which mostly relate to making physical backups of physical books). But invoking "library" isn't some general get out of jail free card with respect to copyright.
These rights are also under constant attack: It's normal to charge libraries exorbitant prices for digital materials compared to their analogue counterparts, for example.
It effectively is. Your consent is not required, and people are doing far worse than just keeping it available (Clearview; there are also reports of people hoovering up encrypted data to crack in the coming decades when we're post-quantum).
This is no different than demanding people not keep track of anything else, and attacking archive.org might make you feel better, but that won't make anyone else stop.
1.) Most people won't opt-in because a significant majority accept defaults and don't opt into most things.
2.) For people like yourself probing a bit deeper, you might well ask whether you really want to give up your ability to decide you don't want something you thought was so funny when you wrote it at 20 now that you're a politician running for office or up for a political appointment.
It's fairly unethical.
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
Perhaps other people still have a need for it.
Thank goodness the IA doesn't blindly obey robots.txt.
Trying to muddle in privacy concerns with the accumulation of public knowledge undermines the whole concept of a shared society, or there being even the potential of accumulating "progress" in the first place.
Also, historically speaking, people with means used to save their letters for posterity, which proved to be a very valuable resource for future academics, so the idea of, what, deleting all your proton mails and signal messages as encouraged is arguably overshooting the return to some pre-internet norm.
Your example is an example of choice or consent. They also had the option to burn their hand written books and scrolls down periodically. Systems like IA take that choice away.
Source: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
You made it public on the damn web, people doing what they wanted with it is fair game per the original ethos of the web. If you wanted it to be private, you should have some auth or encryption.
The actual real world harm is in actually-common-used means of personal communication were network effects preclude on carrying out they business with technology appropriate to desired privacy levels. Chatting on my custom website was always niche, and therefore the network effects argument doesn't carry water.
We should refrain from worrying about robots.txt minute until the elephant in the room is put to rset.
Thanks.
Their documentation about it is rather crap right now, but its in several of their FAQs about it