How is this legal? Sincere question, since all (nearly all? perhaps a couple have been put into public domain) of these games are protected by copyright. And yes, it is hurting the copyright holder in many cases, because many of the titles are still sold through distribution sites like GOG.com. Some of these games are not even that old (<20 years).
They have a DMCA page, but their philosophy seems to be "put it all out there and wait for the DMCA notices." Disingenuous at best since they must know ahead of time that they are violating a lot of IP. It's one thing to be against our global IP laws. It's another thing to flagrantly disregard them. You can be against something without violating it.
How does archive.org get around this with their software collection?
There is an exception in the DMCA for abandonware [1] [2], and anything DMCAd (legitimately) will be darked (remove from public availability, but still stored) until abandonware again.
This seems more fair than having to obtain specific clearance for every work that may fall under copyright (Project Gutenberg has had to tolerate doing this for decades [3]).
> You can be against something without violating it.
Off topic: Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws. Copyright law has become too draconian and infringes on the public good, therefore some don’t respect it. This doesn’t mean content creators shouldn’t get paid.
Disclaimer: No affiliation with the Internet Archive. Words and thoughts are my own.
> Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws.
It's worth noting that in the United States, a lot of civil disobedience that has happened, and is happening now, is built on legal reasoning that the unjust laws in question are also unconstitutional, since our constitution explicitly grants many rights to US citizens.
This also affords a way to commit civil disobedience in good conscience for those whose religion or personal convictions forbid disobedience to civil authority.
> There is an exception in the DMCA for abandonware
Those sources indicate the DMCA exemption is only for single player games requiring online activation where the server is no longer available. That is probably a tiny subset of "abandoned" DOS games.
“I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but looking at the Wikipedia page for the DMCA [0] there appears to be protection for retro games:
An exemption was made for 'Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.'
EDIT: Actually archive.org posted an article about exactly this [1]”
See the link for citations. My understanding is that there are a combination of factors that coincide to provide a safe harbor for the Internet Archive to serve this content.
> There is an exception in the DMCA for abandonware
My point is that several of these titles are not abandonware since they are still being sold by original publishers on GOG.com
> Civil disobedience is non violently disobeying unjust laws. Copyright law has become too draconian and infringes on the public good, therefore some don’t respect it. This doesn’t mean content creators shouldn’t get paid.
Big difference between civil disobedience being justified by laws restricting fundamental rights (e.g. voting rights) and civil disobedience because you want to play an old game. Extreme measures (e.g. breaking laws) should be reserved for big injustices IMHO.
> My point is that several of these titles are not abandonware since they are still being sold by original publishers on GOG.com
As a platform, you aren't required to proactively investigate the copyright status of works uploaded to your platform by the general public. If you leave it up until you get a DMCA takedown request, and promptly remove it if and when the DMCA takedown request arrives, then the DMCA safe-harbor provisions apply.
Any of these original publishers can legally serve a DMCA notice on the Internet Archive, and the Internet Archive will I'm sure promptly respond by removing public access to the material (they will keep it archived so they can restore public access when one day the copyright expires, or if the copyright owners have a future change of heart before then). The fact that those publishers haven't means that either they don't care about what the Internet Archive is doing to their copyrighted works, or possibly even some of them tacitly approve of it.
It is not unheard of for a commercial entity to reason – "X may be technically illegal, but it is unlikely anyone will complain, and even if they do, if we just stop as soon as we get a formal complaint it is unlikely they'll sue us, and even if they do, the fact we stopped as soon as they complained about it will work in our favour legally".
If commercial entities reason like that, and quite often (even if not always) get away with reasoning like that, what is wrong with a not-for-profit entity doing the same? If anything, the fact that its motivations are philanthropic rather than commercial makes it engaging in that kind of reasoning even more defensible.
They have a DMCA page, but their philosophy seems to be "put it all out there and wait for the DMCA notices." Disingenuous at best since they must know ahead of time that they are violating a lot of IP. It's one thing to be against our global IP laws. It's another thing to flagrantly disregard them. You can be against something without violating it.
How does archive.org get around this with their software collection?