Archive.org and copyright?

[cache]

I am wondering how can archive.org make copies of all the websites. Are there any copyright laws on copying websites?

 

[namethreads.com]

They are providing a service to let you see what was on web-sites in the past. I guess this can be considered as "fair use". They are not profitting by doing this.

 

[sm]

yes how one uses someone else's content and with what motive plays an important role in all such cases. Heck, Google has almost ALL of the web on it's servers now think about that nice image gallery that turns up when you search for images on Google Images

 

[jberryhill]

I am wondering how can archive.org make copies of all the websites. Are there any copyright laws on copying websites?

They do it by violating copyright.

There is no "non-profit" exception to copyright infringement, and making copies of entire websites and making them available the way that archive.org would not fall anywhere in the neighborhood of "fair use", which is a very narrow exception.

They generally don't get the bejeezus sued out of them because they respond well to requests by copyright owners to remove content from the archive.

 

[cache]

I am surprised that there are opposite views here.
archive.org has been around long enough, I would want to believe they are legal.
Any more knowledgeable people here would want to comment?

 

[wildbest]

They are absolutely legal.
Their bots are checking robots.txt file before they crawl and index your site.
They have just made a screenshot of what was publicly available by that time.

 

[brewmonkey]

While they may violate copyright there are cases where they can be a lifesaver!

We had been using a small local host for some website stuff and like a bonehead I never downloaded/saved a backup of the site to our own computers. I trusted that their hosting services would always be there and as out contract stated they would provide a backup server as well as backup tapes. What the contract did not specify was what would happen if they went out of business. I mean this was the late 90's, who would have thought it possible for that too happen???

Anyway sometime in about 2001, in the middle of the night with no warning what so ever they shut down their servers, packed them all into a moving van and blew town. Apparently they were in over their heads and when a few of their developers jumped ship they were unable to meet their contractual obligations any more. In debt over their heads, VC money gone and little income coming in was all it took for them to jump ship.

Thankfully with archive.org we were able to salvage a good majority of the site and images.

 

[sm]

that's nice to hear, brewmonkey. It seems there is too much of an unnecessary issue being made out of copyrights etc in this case..... The content that is available on archive.org is clearly marked as belonging to the original content owner. They are not lifting content from some site and behaving as if they own the content. THAT would be a violation of copyright.

 

[vimkar]

that's nice to hear, brewmonkey. It seems there is too much of an unnecessary issue being made out of copyrights etc in this case..... The content that is available on archive.org is clearly marked as belonging to the original content owner. They are not lifting content from some site and behaving as if they own the content. THAT would be a violation of copyright.

i agree ..

 

[jberryhill]

They are absolutely legal.
Their bots are checking robots.txt file before they crawl and index your site.

That does not make it legal. Sorry. You need permission to copy and store content, not the other way around. Most website operators don't know about archive.org, and a good many would be pretty teed off that it works on the principle that someone can come and take your stuff if you don't lock your door.

And, SM, violation of copyright is copying other people's stuff without permission. It does not at all involve how you behave about it.

 

[wildbest]

It is not professional to claim archive.org made a copy without your permission, because this is you who made your site publicly available. If you claim it is not legal that means all Google, Yahoo or MSN cache of your site is illegal... Is that what you tell?

...it works on the principle that someone can come and take your stuff if you don't lock your door.

No! Nobody is taking your stuff. The stuff is entirely yours. It works on the principal that you get additional hosting account for your site for free. Nobody claims what they show is their property.

You have your site on your PC when you develop it. And then you copy it to your hosting account provider to show it to the world. Does it mean that your hosting provider has violated the copyright when they show a copy of your site to all the world. Actually, where is that copy of your site? On your own PC, on your web hosting server, on ISP server, or on visitors PCs?! It is a virtual reality... and your example with the "if you don't lock your door" is simply irrelevant.

 

[Peter]

It is not professional to claim archive.org made a copy without your permission, because this is you who made your site publicly available. If you claim it is not legal that means all Google, Yahoo or MSN cache of your site is illegal... Is that what you tell?

With that argument copying music would be legal as well then it is publically available as long as you buy the cd first.

If you take a look around some sites (for example http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-1024234.html) you will find that google have also come under fire for their cache system. Just because something is in the public domain does not mean it is not subject to copyright laws.

 

[jberryhill]

It is not professional to claim archive.org made a copy without your permission, because this is you who made your site publicly available. If you claim it is not legal that means all Google, Yahoo or MSN cache of your site is illegal... Is that what you tell?

Permanent archives are readily distinguishable from temporary caches. Many news sites, for example, make their current news articles available for free, but they charge for archived stories. If it is legal to make archive copies of sites available for free, then you are undercutting the news sites' ability to charge for their archived content.

There is a specific exception in US copyright law for temporary caching - not for permanent archiving. If you can't see the difference, that's your problem.

http://www.inwa.net/~m3047/archive-org.html

Go read the law yourself:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512

 

[wildbest]

Permanent archives are readily distinguishable from temporary caches.

How?
Search engines are permanently showing temporary caches?!
What is permanent and what is temporary?
When does a temporary cache become permanent? A day? A week? A month...?
You may say "well, lets assume after a month"?!
But if you do not update your site for an year, does it mean that google's "temporary" cache is not temporary anymore because it has been shown for an year?

By publishing your site you say to the public "Go, make a copy of my site"! Because in order to read it I HAVE to make a copy. In fact, several hundred of copies are made throughout the entire Web until your content is on my screen! You did not tell me, however, how long I can keep that copy?

 

[jberryhill]

By publishing your site you say to the public "Go, make a copy of my site"! Because in order to read it I HAVE to make a copy.

You did not read the law. Either that, or you read it, and do not understand it. By publishing your site, you do NOT say to the public "Go, keep a copy of my site, and make that copy available to other people years after my site has changed."

As pointed out above, the robots.txt exclusion method is flawed, because archive.org STILL stores the content, but it does not make it available if the *current* robots.txt says not to make the content available. In other words, if you change to another site or domain name, and your old domain name expires, then the subsequent owner of the domain name will control whether your old content is made available - without your consent or control.

But getting back to the point, the law perfectly well recognizes that intermediate and transitory cache copies are made all of the time, and the law expressly makes an exception for the normal operation of transitory copies in accordance with the purpose of making things viewable on the web. If you cannot distinguish between that and a permanent archive, then I'm afraid I can't help you to understand the difference.

 

[wildbest]

You did not read the law. Either that, or you read it, and do not understand it...

If you pretend you undertand it, you should know the answer of that question.
When does a temporary copy becomes permanent?

 

[Mark]

If you pretend you undertand it, you should know the answer of that question.
When does a temporary copy becomes permanent?

In case you missed it , jberryhill is an Attorney .... and I'm quite sure he does know what he's talking about

 

[jberryhill]

If you pretend you undertand it, you should know the answer of that question.
When does a temporary copy becomes permanent?

Most of the time, the law addresses broad questions with a rule of reasonableness. If you go and actually bother to read the law, at the link I gave you, you'd come across this condition on how long an intermediate service provider may maintain a cache copy in the ordinary course of accessing material on the web:

and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections

The entire point of the EXCEPTION to ordinary copyright liability is about the necessity of copying, as you point out above, in the normal course of making material available on the web so that people can read it. Absolutely, zillions of copies are made in that process - temporarily - and that is precisely what the copyright law is trying to capture here. However, the idea that maintaining a date-indexed archive of years-old copies of web pages has ANYTHING to do with that exception requires a studied ignorance of the what the law is trying to accomplish with the cache copy exception. And the fact that this is an *exception* to copyright liability should tell you something.

 

[wildbest]

and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections

I am always suspicious when somebody uses too many words. He is either trying to hide something, or he simply does not know what he is trying to say.

I have asked you simple question, how long does it take for a temporary copy to become permanent?

Making point of the quote above...
Very often you can see that Google's cache is unchanged for years. If you say this is different from Alexa's approach to caching in the archive.org, how that can be explained with a "necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections"?

 

[IAmAllanShore]

Wildbest,
Time to take the 'tude down a step brutha.

He has answered your "simple question" twice; if you fail to understand it this point, I would just let it go.

As far as the topic at hand is concerned: I have requested twice in the past that archive.org and a university project take down dated content from my sites that was archived, but then I thought better of. They did without so much as a wimper, and all was fine.

-Allan

I am always suspicious when somebody uses too many words. He is either trying to hide something, or he simply does not know what he is trying to say.

I have asked you simple question, how long does it take for a temporary copy to become permanent?

Making point of the quote above...
Very often you can see that Google's cache is unchanged for years. If you say this is different from Alexa's approach to caching in the archive.org, how that can be explained with a "necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections"?