Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens

I'd like to imagine a world where every lawyer, when their case is helped by a Wayback Machine snapshot of something, flips a few bucks to IA. They could afford a world-class admin team in no time flat.

That's a terrible solution. The Wayback Machine takes down their snapshots at the request of whoever controls the domain. That's not archival.

If the state of a webpage in the past matters to you, you need a record that won't cease to exist when your opposition asks it to. This is the concept behind perma.cc.

No, they don’t delete the archived content. When the domain’s robots.txt file bans spidering, then the Wayback Machine _hides_ the content archived at that domain. It is still stored and maintained, but it isn’t distributed via the website. The content will be unhidden if the robots.txt file stops banning spiders, or if an appropriate request is made.

In some cases they do appear to delete, on request.

edit: "Other types of removal requests may also be sent to info@archive.org. Please provide as clear an explanation as possible as to what you are requesting be removed for us to better understand your reason for making the request.", https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...

Nope. Nothing is deleted, just hidden.

How do you know?

I worked there for a short while.

So if the Internet Archive accidentally archived child porn, they wouldn’t delete it?

I suspect they DO delete some things.

Don't be asinine; of course there are exceptions. But the general rule is that nothing is deleted. Even if you have a fancy expensive lawyer send them a C&D letter asking them to delete something or else, they’ll just hide it. You can’t tell the difference from the outside. In fact there are monitoring alarms that are triggered if something _is_ deleted.

Claiming to have deleted something while just having hidden from public view… that’s basically begging content owners to sue and very easily win damages.

Copyright only regulates the distribution of copies of copyrighted works. Possessing copies and distributing copies to other people are two different things.

If you were photocopying a textbook and giving it to your classmates, the publisher could have their lawyer send you a Cease and Desist letter telling you to stop (or else). But if they told you to burn your copy of the textbook then they would be overreaching, and everyone would laugh at them when you took that story to the papers.

Legal reasoning from made‐up examples is generally a bad idea, but I think you can safely reason from that one.

I’m not privy to the actual communications in these cases, but I suspect that instead of replying back with “we deleted the content from the Archive”, they instead say something anodyne like “the content is no longer available via the Wayback Machine”. Smart lawyers will notice the difference, but then a smart lawyer wouldn’t have expected anything else.

> Legal reasoning from made‐up examples is generally a bad idea

What? That's the only way to do legal reasoning, and as an obvious consequence it's how both lawyers and judges do it.