Slashdot Mirror
EU Tells Internet Archive That Much Of Its Site Is 'Terrorist Content' (techdirt.com)
Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: We've been trying to explain for the past few months just how absolutely insane the new EU Terrorist Content Regulation will be for the internet. Among many other bad provisions, the big one is that it would require content removal within one hour as long as any "competent authority" within the EU sends a notice of content being designated as "terrorist" content. The law is set for a vote in the EU Parliament just next week. And as if they were attempting to show just how absolutely insane the law would be for the internet, multiple European agencies (we can debate if they're "competent") decided to send over 500 totally bogus takedown demands to the Internet Archive last week, claiming it was hosting terrorist propaganda content. [...] And just in case you think that maybe the requests are somehow legit, they are so obviously bogus that anyone with a browser would know they are bogus. Included in the list of takedown demands are a bunch of the Archive's "collection pages" including the entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, it's collection of over 15 million freely downloadable texts, the famed Prelinger Archive of public domain films and the Archive's massive Grateful Dead collection. Oh yeah, also a page of CSPAN recordings. So much terrorist content!
1) robots.txt retroactively will delete things from the archive. Just create one telling the archive to skip certain content, and the archive will obey.
2) I just spent the past couple weeks digging up over 20 years of my own history thanks to the Internet Archive. All of this was previously published software, some 70 different projects. I've been pulling their archive and a couple others, mixing it all together, organizing it, and republishing a lot of the old software projects online via GitHub so anyone can use them freely. Hell, to be entirely honest, half of these projects I had even forgotten I did! Without the archive, all of this would have been lost. Now that the code is in git repositories, I've been able to quickly and easily mirror it to several places and properly archive it myself. They're a godsend!