Help talk:Using archive.today

One of the editors posted the following edit summary, when removing the words commenting on the copyright issues:

"Remove grossly inappropriate description, US law is not world law, so don't apply it here, not to mention this is seriously confusing what copyright really is, whether there is or isn't robots.txt is irrelevant and libraries have different laws."

First, no one has claimed US law is world law. All I am saying is that Wikipedia does not want (and is not legally able) to violate US copyright law, nor does it want to incur endless DMCA take-down requests, which will surely be the result if people start linking Wikipedia articles to unauthorized archived copies of copyrighted works. Pointing out that copyright laws are different in other countries is obviously irrelevant.

Second, I agree that the honoring of robots and the honoring of copyright laws are two different things. However, as the proposed wording explains, robot exclusion files are the only known means used by responsible web archives to avoid copyright infringement. If Archive.is has some other way of avoiding copyright infringement, that would be fine. But they don't. The Archive.is contains a large amount of copyright infringing material, which anyone can see for themselves. (See an example on the Wikipedia article on Archive.is, but you better hurry, because there is a nomination for deletion of that article.) So, the fact that Archive.is refuses to honor robot exclusions for copyrighted material is closely related to the fact that they are violating copyright law.

Third, the editor says the proposed text is a "grossly inappropriate description", but justification for this claim is based on the misunderstanding noted above. The proposed text is entirely appropriate. Wikipedia should not be a party to copyright infringement. Can we at least agree on this?Weakestletter (talk) 21:12, 23 September 2013 (UTC)