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Over 1,100 New Arcade Games Added To the Internet Archive (archive.org)
Jason Scott, writing for Internet Archive blog: The Internet Arcade, our collection of working arcade machines that run in the browser, has gotten a new upgrade in its 4th year. Advancements by both the MAME emulator team and the Emscripten conversion process allowed our team to go through many more potential arcade machines and add them to the site. The majority of these newly-available games date to the 1990s and early 2000s, as arcade machines both became significantly more complicated and graphically rich, while also suffering from the ever-present and home-based video game consoles that would come to dominate gaming to the present day. Even fervent gamers might have missed some of these arcade machines when they were in the physical world, due to lower distribution numbers and shorter times on the floor.
The vast majority of games available will be unlicensed commercial games. In a time where many rom sites have been shut down why is archive.org exempted from this?
Copyright law allows for registered libraries to archive and loan copyrighted material that is no longer actively for sale.
This actively for sale rule only applies to registered libraries however.
Combined with the first sale doctrine and sony bono act, it is legal under copyright law for archive.org to lend these materials.
I only remember two cases in the past decade someone uploaded currently covered and for sale material, and archive.org removed it immediately in both cases.
I'm sure there have been more than just those two, but my point is this happens so rarely that no one in the authors guild or legal system believes for a moment they are responsible for any mass copyright infringement.