The Internet Archive Is Now the Largest Collection of Historical Software Online

hypnosec writes "The Internet Archive has a great collection of books, music, visual items and websites but, it had one thing lacking up until now – software. This has changed recently as The Internet Archive now claims to hold the largest collection of software in the world. The expansion at the Internet Archive has come through collaboration with other independent archives like the Disk Drives collection, the FTP site boneyard, Shareware CD Archive, and the TOSEC archive. The archive doesn't hold just the software – it also holds documentation as well."

Comments

"and websites"

[xushi]

Out of curiosity, how is this even legal?

legally should/would they be held liable if one of those millions of sites has illegal content, like say child pornography or pedophilia? Or can any user use `mass archiving` as an excuse should they ever get caught with any illegal porn, copyrighted material, et al..

Or what if they archived a copyrighted site without asking the owners for permission, such as a personal site, or one of those news sites that keep complaining about others who link to them - or even those persons who link to them...

There are many more examples, but it looks like this should cause more issues rather than good use.

Re:"and websites"

[djsmiley]

Hmmmm - well I help out with ArchiveTeam, we grab some of the sites which go in.

Anyway.... as far as I understand is that the IA have a special licence/cause/getout agreement which lets them do this as a charity. Of course if CP or other illegal items were found, they are blacked out - they still are archived but aren't accessable by the public (I don't know exactly what happens to CP, but other stuff just goes away). The same for other works which companies request blacking out. Apparently this happens with _a lot_ of nintendo materials, and with a 100 year history you can imagine this is a large selection of material.