Internet Archive Gets DMCA Exemption

Paul Hickman writes "The Internet Archive has successfully lobbied for a DMCA exemption for the Software Archive. The IA keeps out-of-date programs, games and other random craziness for future programmers to savor. At the rapid pace of software development, this makes sure that we can create a history for us to remember and wonder at the programming of early games."

Now all that we need is

a personal DMCA exemption for every US Citizen.... sigh

Re:Now all that we need is

There are several reasons, such as the same comment being copied to a new discussion, repetition of information in the article summary, unnecessary mirroring of content in the slashdot story (which is also illegal, not that I care much) and for people saying the same stupid boring shit that people have been saying for the last n years, like "but does it run linux". With that said, this does not appear to be one of those moments...

Can they ignore takedown orders?

Does this mean that they can ignore DMCA takedown orders on all content? Or just that they're immune to prosecution if they reverse-engineer and break a copy-protection system of a work that's already in the public domain and out of copyright?

If it's the latter, while it's a nice move, there isn't really any software (except stuff on Hollerith cards) that's anywhere near getting into the public domain anyway. So it would seem to be a moot point. If they have permission to archive all content though, even stuff that's still in copyright, that would be decent.

I've read elsewhere though that the exemptions from the Copyright Office aren't permanent, but need to be renewed every few years or they expire. So all that has to happen to destroy everything is for an administration to pressure the Copyright Office to let the exemption slip, and then threaten to prosecute the IA if they don't destroy the de-protected works. Someone in another thread likened it to being given a Band-Aid after you've gotten the crap beaten out of you with a lead pipe; a nice gesture, but ultimately it would have been nicer to not get beaten in the first place.

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

Can I store my MP3 collection there? I wouldn't want to to get lost.

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

In the European Union we currently watch the next stage of madness. They prepared legislation which would turn all intentional infringements of an IP right into a criminal offense. [ffii.org] No fair use exemptions yet.

Article 3 Offences
Member States shall ensure that all intentional infringements of an intellectual property right on a commercial scale, and attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting such infringements, are treated as criminal offences.

Let's see whether parliament will fix it. I hope that at least the following amendment will be accepted:

Article 3, paragraph 2 (new)

Amendment
Member States shall ensure that the fair and
reasonable use of a protected work including
such use by reproduction in copies or audio
or by any other means, for purposes such as
criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching
(including multiple copies for classroom use),
scholarship, archiving, format conversion or
research will not be treated as a criminal
offence.

Justification:

Paragraph 1 of Article 3 describes what shall be treated as a criminal offence. New paragraph 2
affirms desirable fair uses which shall never get punished by criminal sanctions, and are vital for
a free and open society. Amendment derived from to 17 U. S.C. 107

Please write to Member of the Legal Affairs Committee [europa.eu] and ask them to support or table the amendment. Lobbying at the right time can prevent a lot of problems which occur when the law will be executed. Then you or your business will get into danger. Please ask MEPs to support the fair use provision!

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

There is no fair use on a commercial scale, its just using someone else's work to gain profit

Scale != gain. You could make no money, not even at your own loss (not recouping your own costs), and still infringe on a commercial scale.

Also, criminal penalty for incitement to pirate? So if I were to tell people to massively violate Disney's copyright on Steamboat Willie (or other works that would have gone to the public domain if not for extensions), and people do it on a scale of a commercial act, even if not for commercial gain, that would be criminal incitement to infringe copyright.

Expect any sharing that isn't limited in volume of copies to be considered commercial-scale infringement. Especially as they don't care how many copies you make but rather how many copies you potentially could have made to googol the penalties (remember talk of small operations' equipment being "equivalent to N 1x CD burners"?).

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

But please explain under what conditions unlimited sharing should be considered fair use.

Unlimited distribution of a fair-use use of a work, such as a parody, should not automatically convert a fair use into an unfair one. In fact, many parodies have outlived the work they parody (Don Quixote, a famous parody of the now obscure Amadis de Gaula).

I'd argue political commentary or protest, such as incitement to pirate Steamboat Willie, when the object of protest is the very copyright extensions made on its behalf, should also be considered fair use, though I doubt the law (let alone Disney) would agree.

Jumping the ocean, though "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" is one of the measures of fair use, it does not proscribe the use of a work in its entirety from enjoying a fair use defense (e.g. use of entire Barbie dolls in a parody (Mattel Inc. v. Walking Mountain Productions) and the recording of entire television shows for timeshifted personal private viewing (Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, granted that "personal private" limitation undermines, not underlines the original point)).

I'd also argue that I should have unfettered right to reproduce and distribute any and all commercials ever made (and Giganews should carry alt.binaries.multimedia.commercials in its feed so that I can) as by their nature every viewing public or private benefits them, for which each viewing costs them nothing (when they normally have to pay huge sums to get air time). Promotional materials should not be protected by copyright. And certainly materials whose lifetime is substantially shorter than the copyright term protecting them should not be granted effectively indefinite protection!

And the same for any unpaid incidental appearance of a product in another work, or any use for which a work has become traditional, such as the singing of "Happy Birthday" in a restaurant or in an audiovisual work of fiction. Holiday songs created to become sung every time that holiday comes along should not enjoy protection from the very behavior they sought to engender.

(BTW, I should let you know that I often go out on tangents when discussing such things, or respond in part to others who are not the parent message, such as and especially the original article or its summary. I try to allow context to properly attach my meaning and the subject of my address. Please don't get upset that I may not be talking your points.)

BTW, Ob:IANAL.

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

Sure there is. Sampling for instance. There's a big difference between a short sample creatively integrated into a new song(fair) and selling bootlegs in chinatown(unfair).

Re:Can they ignore takedown orders?

They made the exception for obsolete computer programs/games among others. Their definition of obsolete is:

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.

Takedown orders will still hold, if the content is still manufactured. Well, at least they don't have to wait until it reaches public domain!

The first few pages of the official document [copyright.gov] (pdf warning) give more details.

Yes, and I, uh, need one also...

I am a special archivist librarian, um, responsible for the collection of laser-readable media in my home^H^H^H^H *library* and I need a special exemption also so that my friends^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fellow librarians are able to enjoy^H^H^^H^H^H access the material contained therein.

Sincerely
Pirate^H^H^H^H^H^H Bob

Re:Yes, and I, uh, need one also...

I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your torren^H^H^H^H^H^H journal.

Not just IA

What's important to note here is that the exemption isn't limited just to the Internet Archive. IANAL but unless I'm reading something hideously wrongly, this seems to generally exempt software from the protection granted by the DMCA if the hardware to run it isn't reasonably available. Have they just legitimized the abandonware scene?

It also means...

That future generations will have a source (other than oldversion.com [oldversion.com]) for previous versions of software for use with version specific cracks.

Whoops! Was that out loud?

At long last

All of our Anna Nicole Smith screensavers are free! Future generations can now, openly and freely enjoy the fruits of our culture and learn from our ways. Rejoice brothers!

You win THIS round, internet archive

But this ain't over...not by a long shot!

$50,000 in pro-bono time

It's nice to know the lawyers spent a whole 50 minutes on this case....

All 6 exemptions

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors. 2. 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. 3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights November 17, 2006 Page 2 damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace. 4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book's read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format. 5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network. 6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Starting to change my mind

I really am, on copyrights and the "me, me, me" mindset. I say let those folks crap be lost to the ages, gone. People who want the "don't you dare touch my stuff!" form of rights-go right ahead! I hope it gets lost in time, never to be seen again. Data of any kind that is open format, licensed to use, will survive. All those "artists" and closed off DRM content? fine! let it go away! Softare, games? Who cares really? Let it go, ignore it, ridicule it, make fun of it! I say go about using and creating open content, that is the only content that is guaranteed to at least have a chance to survive. the rest-as soon as company x goes out of business or some new format comes out and people lose interest..buh bye!

In the past, cultures that didn't care, didn't leave readable records-we don't know-or *care*- much about them. They are gone, as they should be. Whereas cultures that wrote things down in an intelligent way, using the best tech of the time, had their culture and language and works survive and they are still important today. Evolution not only goes to survival of the fittest, but survival of the most robust and open, because their knowledge base expanded rapidly, which lead to them being important, which lead them to being viable down through time.

Let the jerks go to all the trouble to create something, then make it a bear to stay viable or readable, their loss! Let them lock it up, charge huge fees for every peek at it or use, let them stay walled off, keep it buried in their vaults, throw away the key, bury it, obfuscate it, make it just so hard to use that..no one in the future will care! Let their own hubris be their legacy, their paranoid delusions of grandeur that their stuff is so valuable that humans will make the effort to try and decipher their weirdly coded and encumbered "works", when reality will be that the stuff that is easy to get to and easy to read and use and enjoy will stick around much better.

Yeah, but ...

"$50,000 in pro bono lawyer time". WTF is wrong with government when it takes this kind of leverage to get anything done? How would the average person ever hope to get any consideration at all?

And let's not forget - this "exemption" is courtesy of the very same people who created the need for an exemption - congress.

Stop voting for incumbent politicians and DMCA-type garbage will stop happening in the first place.

Submissions

So let's say I want to submit my game [metasquared.com], which is already listed on Tucows [tucows.com], to this site.

How would it get indexed? I could not find a link to contribute software. After Home of the Underdogs [the-underdogs.info] grabbed it without so much as notifying me (but whatever; I'm flattered more than anything else), I would think this would be simple.

On a totally unrelated matter..

I wonder if DeCSS can be included in the IA's Software archive, now? :)

Why not move Internet Archive to Europe ?

Hmm... why not sweeden and forget about DMCA altogether ?
Europe would be pleased I guess. And we need good lobbyist
against software patents :-)

Re:Who funds the Internet Archive?

http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php [archive.org]

Alexa Internet has been crawling the web since 1996, which has resulted in a massive archive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet [wikipedia.org]

Alexa Internet is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com, that is best known for operating a website (www.alexa.com) that provides information on the web traffic to other websites. Alexa collects information from users who have installed an Alexa Toolbar, allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, as well as lists of related links.

http://www.imilly.com/alexa.htm [imilly.com]
Is Alexa spyware?
Well, no ... probably not. At least not if you haven't deliberately installed some of their software.

But Lavasoft's Ad-Aware identifies a standard registry key included with Internet Explorer as "Data Miner" spyware, with little or no further explanation, and offers to delete it. I hope this page offers a better explanation, and other alternatives to deletion. Spybot identifies it too, with more explanation, and they have a smarter strategy to deal with it (more below).
The issue is the 'Related Links' feature of IE (pre-XP SP2) which appears as the 'Tools'/'Show Related Links' menu item (and a corresponding toolbar button if you added it from the 'Customize...' link on the toolbar). If you use that feature, IE will contact the Alexa servers, via MSN, to obtain information about other web pages which seem to be related, open an Explorer Bar, and display those (plus adverts and whatnot). Go check the Alexa web site to see if you think that is a good idea (and, just to be clear, I think it's a very sucky idea), or just to double-check that you haven't deliberately or unintentionally or absent-mindedly installed some of their software.

Essentially it a two edged sword.
you have the positive in the internet archive which is kind of a byproduct from alexas data mining activitys

It didnt have to be created at all but Alexas authors figured we wouldnt mind if they tracked our visits to different sites if they gave something useful back (The Internet Archive). ..

Re:Who funds the Internet Archive?

The internet archive predates Alexa, although both were founded by Brewster Kahle. As for ad-aware, they have not offered any explanation as to why alexa is identified for removal, yet the google toolbar, even with "advanced features" enabled, is not. A friend of mine who is swedish and works for alexa even stopped by the lavasoft office in sweden to request a meeting. Most likely it helps that google bundles ad-aware with the google desktop.

Re:Seriously?

How can you claim you didn't write the parent post? We can all see clearly that you have the exact same user name!!!

Ok, I'll get back in my box now...

not good news

Not yay!

Seeking and receiving an exemption validates and legitimizes the DMCA. This is very similar to answering "no" to "Did you steal software today?"

Re:Seriously?

... as the AC just reflects the the attitude of virtually everyone else on /. with regards to the DMCA.

With regard to the DMCA. Learn to write, shithead!

Now that's flamebait!