Is defeating a 40-year-old copy protection mechanism still illegal under Section 1201 of the DMCA, or have they changed the law to make an exception for "very old" software?
Once it hits 70 years from the lifetime of the author (so probably another 80 or 90 years from now) and is in public domain, that might change things since there will no longer be copyright being protected.
In terms of copyright terms, this software is still pretty young, not even halfway to public domain. It's disrespectful to call it "very old".
Agreed. And by the logic whereby everybody over a certain age is more likely to already have HPV if they were "active", vaccination should be even more recommended to people >45 who start dating again after a monogamous life, right? Because the assumption would be that they don't have it yet, and they are now starting to have sexual encounters with people who are more likely to have it.
More couples are divorcing after age 50 than ever before, so this is not just abstract theory.
Also last time I checked the statistics for HPV strains like HPV-6 or HPV-16, only 5% or less of males were infected by that specific strain. So on a single-strain basis it's not quite "you probably already have it". Cumulatively, it is no doubt higher considering all strains, but the argument against vaccination for all strains on the basis that recipients may already have a few of those strains seems flawed.
I too would like to see the question asked by unicornporn answered: how could this be legal?
Why isn't the FBI raiding them like it did with Megaupload?
Even if it's technically a non-profit, it's still profiting from this piracy in terms of advertising, which in turn is meant to attract funding, which pays for the officers and other employees and their extravagant office buildings, right? There seems to be a lot of money involved!
The Internet Archive benefits from an exemption concerning the circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, i.e. section 1201(a)(1). But how can it be covered by the immunity granted under the Safe Harbor provision of section 512(g) of the DMCA, when this is not content submitted by an unrelated user, nor isn't the Internet Archive unaware of the fact that it doesn't own the copyrights on these materials?
The Internet Archive seems to be out of control in the hands of narcissistic egomaniacs like Jason Scott, who doesn't miss an opportunity to boast about his antisocial behavior. Just look at his Twitter feed of the past few days: snaps a photo while driving by a bloody car accident, returns from a wedding overseas and takes a photo of the no-photography sign at the customs office...
This is piracy plain and simple, on both the copyright and the trademark front, on a massive scale. Shame on the Internet Archive for doing what any script kiddie could do from their bedroom (i.e. put an existing TOSEC dump online). With their resources, they should have found a legal way of doing it! We need changes to the law to protect and make accessible true abandonware, not irresponsible actions like these, which are hurting future chances of the Internet Archive and others to foster such changes, and benefit from them.
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