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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid that, at one point in time, a DMCA takedown might backfire at the archive. I mean, it has been taken down on Github, but it's of course available at archive.org - it would hurt the internet as a whole if the archive needs to close it's doors.

Hopefully that will never happen.

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I'm not 100% sure of all the details, but archive.org has some exceptions[1] to the DMCA & thanks to California, it's officially considered a library - which again, I believe gives it some more leeway on the DMCA.

[1]: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

In the event a DMCA notice must be actioned, the content is no longer made available ("darked") but it remains archived for the future.

I never get how Archive.org can get away with... everything? Like every single console game is there. Nintendo is very famous to take down ROM sites yet their full library is on Archive.org. And that's Nintendo only, all the PS1, PS2, PS3 games and the whole Xbox/360 catalog is there as well. It's crazy

In some aspect Archive.org is better than some private torrent trackers

I've been worrying about this as well. I recently found a Beetles discography on Archive.org even after TPB turned up almost nothing. It's great being able to find things, but It'd be a shame to loose all of the legitimate content because of getting associated with blatant piracy.

Meatspace libraries often have a big collection of CDs too. This is part of our cultural heritage, and I think making it accesible in this form is a no-brainer.

(By the way, maybe it was a typo, but the spelling is "Beatles". They were better at songwriting than puns.)

Because they're a library with a DMCA exception (which may be expiring soon), they are allowed to host that content. That doesn't mean you are allowed to download it though. Normal copyright and DMCA law still applies to you as a consumer of this content. Also Jason Scott has stated that they prefer to take a stance of "just upload whatever it is first, then if someone complains we will take it down".

I'm so happy they somehow keep going. I've found so much otherwise dead software there, esp. obscure windows 3.1 games I played growing up :)

There's plenty of precedent for archives. National libraries get a copy of everything published, and anybody is allowed to borrow and read from it for free. I think there is a recognition that preserving history is important.

archive.org regularly removes things when they are alerted :(

Sounds like we need an archive.org archive

It depends on whether Github or Winamp can be arsed; given that it's been posted on HN now, they are probably on the trail now.

Archive.org can't just ignore a DMCA takedown, that would threaten their safe haven status.

Winamp at this point in time is just a trademark that ended up at a Belgian company. And I think they want to use it to launch a music streaming service. The rest of Nullsoft went down with AOL. I wonder which party would even have the legal rights to move against such a source code leak.

They are claiming they have rights to the code too: "I am acting on behalf of AudioValley SA who currently owns the copyright to the Winamp code after a purchase from AOL."

I wonder what happened to NSIS, the NullSoft InstallSystem?

Used it myself as a teen to have a professional looking installer for my software releases.

I still occasionally see software with NSIS installers and Nullsoft copyright. So I wonder what entity is behind it now days.

NSIS has nothing to do with the lot that own Winamp & it was a clearly defined "not part of the sale" as it has been OSS from early on around it's v1.0 iirc which was a long long time before Winamp was eventually sold.

I still think they should be using their own forum with an archive of the NSIS sub-forum to ensure that there's a clear distinction between them & the lot that now own Winamp (as there's no benefit for them to be keeping that forum running other than a trickle of ad revenue) but that's down to those that lead NSIS to decide upon.

-dro

NSIS is open source, seems to be maintained by the community.

We should have infrastructure for sharing things like this without putting a centralized entity like archive.org in the crosshairs. Bittorrent comes to mind, but it could only be part of the solution.

IPFS is perfect for this.

Almost, but since it publicly associates the files you share with your IP address, I don't see most interested people willing to use it in this context.

Pinning services exist, VPN's exist, also every other technology including torrents exposes your IP.

True, but torrents et al make you a peer, so you're also distributing, not just saving a copy locally. At least that's how I've always understood it in terms of legal risk.

But yeah, VPN has (so far) been enough for me to avoid being low hanging fruit when torrenting something I don't have a license to "distribute" while seeding.

To be fair, most Bittorrent users have not had any legal issues (while downloading copyrighted stuff).

Disclaimer: I'm not into shitcoins, and I am not shilling this coin at all.

However, the goals of Filecoin seem to be right up this alley. Distribute file storage among billions of users where the more you host and help the swarm, the more coins you earn.

https://filecoin.io/

Last I checked (about a month ago) there was still no way to "help the swarm" without having a ridiculous set up but I imagine someone with more experience will correct me.

All archive.org items have a torrent file, so even if IA goes down you can still download the item from seeders.

This isn't an archive.org item strictly speaking, just a page on the wayback machine. I'm not sure you can download it.

Sure you can. Add 'oe_' to the end of the datetime, and you'll get the original HTML file.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210515031018oe_/https://github...

Saving the front page of a Github project isn't the same thing as clicking the download source button.

https://gun.eco/

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