Nikola Smolenski wrote:
I wanted to suggest this for a long time. I see two more reasons for this:
- We are often copying free images or text from various sites (for
example flickr but other ones too). It happens that these sites go offline or change their licenses later. Having such an archive, archived by an independent organization, would be indisputable proof of copyright status.
Personally I wouldn't rely on a flickr CC license as being in any way reliable. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Flickr_washing
I've seen too many AP photographs cropped to remove the AP attribute and uploaded to flickr as CC-BY to accept a flickr CC license at face value. In most cases the person doing so is probably taking stuff already cropped, and probably believes that if it is on the internet its public domain.
No university, publisher, or newspaper has used my CC licensed images either commercially or non-commercially without checking with me first that the work is actually CC licensed. They have always carried out some form of due diligence to ascertain that the image is either licensed properly, and that they get a specific license to reuse. IOW they obtain a 'paper trail' of permission.
- Wikipedia often writes articles about current events, and these link
to various news organizations as sources. It happens sometimes that these sources stealthily change their content for various reasons. Such an archive, if it would be able to quickly follow Wikipedia's new links, would be a strong deterrent against this Orwellian trend.
If someone is making copies of web pages that is a copyright violation. Unless they have, in the US, specific exemption from the US Copyright Office, that can lead to some heavy legal issues. The internet archive happens to have limited permissions on obsolete games and software, but otherwise it respects copyright and robots.txt and applies the directives retroactively.
http://www.archive.org/about/terms.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Healthcare_Advocates.2C_Inc. http://web.archive.org/web/20020923133856rn_1/www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI...