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?UR…