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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I love IA but honestly they're almost not a library anymore. You can find entire ROMsets for a lot of consoles for games that are still being commercially sold both physically and digitally, you can download without any kinds of restrictions (no attempts at controlled digital lending or anything like it), and without having to see a bunch of ads for "Horny and Single MILFS in your area".

You can also download full TV series that are currently still available on Netflix and full movies and lots of other stuff. I'm all for archiving, and I think they'd have a case if this were Abandonware or Lost Media, but I fear that a lot of stuff on there simply isn't and their ambivalence towards flagrant abuses of copyright is going to get them repeatedly sued.

It's annoying, because IA is a wonderful resource and it would be a shame if they get sued out of existence.

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Even though I think it was foolish, I do kind of understand the logic.

The IA wants to preserve digital media. Sometimes it’s a website, sometimes it’s a CD, sometimes it’s a ROM image, and sometimes it’s a scan of paper.

In the end though, I don’t think it’s the archiving part that got them in trouble. It was providing access to that archive.

Yeah, I mean, if they just had an archived ISO of every PS3 game in existence sitting on hard drives in the back, I don't think that would be a problem and I doubt that would get them sued because I think that would likely fall under fair use, especially for a library (IANAL), especially if they had purchased legitimate copies of the games and/or had them donated.

In fact, I suspect that if they did some kind of controlled lending program of the PS3 games, or the ISO was available to use upon request (e.g. like the US library of congress), that likely wouldn't get them sued either, but as it stands I'm not seeing a fundamental difference between IA and ThePirateBay, sans the lack of viruses and popups from the former.

> (e.g. like the US library of congress)

Does the LoC do something like this?

Yes.

https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/09/yes-the-library-of-c...

The relevant sentence from the link: I would very much like to reach the point where we are able to provide access to some digital surrogate of the game while keeping the original disc in storage in the same way that we provide access to digital surrogates of our film and video collection fiberoptically to terminals in the Moving Image reading room.

Even if they can't figure out a way to do that, the material should become freely available after copyright expires. It might take 120 years for that to happen, but better late than never.

I've never done it, but I believe the answer is "yes". I believe you can go to the physical library of congress and view their archived media. I don't believe you can check it out or distribute it without the copyright holders permission, but I think you can view it while you're there.

Again, never done it, only seen stuff in YouTube videos, and not even recently.

> In fact, I suspect that if they did some kind of controlled lending program of the PS3 games, or the ISO was available to use upon request (e.g. like the US library of congress), that likely wouldn't get them sued either,

And if they really want to push the boundaries of format shifting and copyright, this would be a more productive avenue for it. Some physical libraries have games already, why not a digital one?

Yep, completely agree.

My local library has video games to borrow; I've never done it but I have no doubt that the NYPL has done their due diligence to avoid getting sued.

A "format-shift" is kind of untested ground legally and I think a consequence of how IA is doing stuff is going to lead to some really bad legal precedent that might take decades to undo.

No -- they are allowing unrestricted uploads where they do almost no pruning of anysort. Random 3rd parties are uploading whatever they want. Some from the usenet warez scene have even starting migrating towards archive.org .

They have become a megaupload.com site of shorts with slightly better reputation.

I suspect they're going to be forced to implement some kind of YouTube-esque Content ID system, or risk being sued out of existence.

Data harboring laws protect them a bit, they have some level plausible deniability, but I think that only gets them so far; surely they know at least as well as I know how easy it is to get pirated media. The engineers who work on IA aren't morons, and they certainly know how to Google just as well as me, not to mention that they have access to internal databases that I don't.

It's even better than Megaupload; there's no ads on IA. No popups, no banners, AFAIK no tracking, everything has a torrentable version with a guarantee of at least one seed; hell it's still kind of SFW; it wouldn't be an inherent red flag to my employer if they saw Internet Archive in my history on a work computer.

No, they aren't. They actively remove content that has been subject to a legitimate takedown request. As has been the case many times when I've tried to use them for piracy.

If you haven’t been able to use them for piracy then you’re not trying terribly hard. I downloaded a game directly from IA that’s still actively being sold yesterday.

I don’t doubt that they respond to takedown requests, I just think they need to be more proactive about stuff.

So did megaupload.

Yep, as I said here a few minutes ago, there will be more lawsuits like this coming and the big one should be coming from the video game publishing industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40214377

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