Internet Archive Wins Copyright Reprieve
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One of the drawbacks of Internet publishing is its ephemeral nature. Sites come and go, often with the information they contained being lost when they meet their demise. The non-profit Internet Archive project has been working for the past ten years to archive as much of the web as possible.
Fortunately for those of us with an appreciation of history, they have just been granted exemption from US copyright law.
Source: The Register
Fortunately for those of us with an appreciation of history, they have just been granted exemption from US copyright law.
Don't be surprised if you end up spending hours visiting the Internet Archive and their massive repository of amazing websites.The Library of Congress has published six exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalises duplication of material copyrighted to someone else. The exemption is from punishment for breaking the kinds of copy controls on material which are designed to stop unauthorised duplication.
One of the six exemptions is for computer software or games for the purposes of preservation, but only if the original machine, format or technology involved is obsolete.
The ruling grants exemption to "computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive".
"A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace," it says.
Source: The Register
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