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Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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