There are [1] but they seem to be pretty rooted in making a copy of original works in a physical library. The parent's point that the IA operates in a very grey area of law and therefore needs to bend over backwards to comply with requests to remove material still applies.
Ask yourself what you would rather have the IA spends it's meager funds on: buying hardware and paying people to do critical work or paying a bunch of lawyers to fight lawsuits against much better funded opponents they would lose anyway.
I asked, and the answer was: "it's important to fight these fights, which is why I'm donating to the ACLU".
I believe Us Code 108 is relevant here. It starts:
it is not an infringement of copyright for a library
or archives, or any of its employees acting within the
scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than
one copy or phonorecord of a work[...]
There's obviously more to it that I haven't done research on, but that's a pretty good start and I wouldn't worry too much about lawsuits. In fact, if they were at risk of lawsuits, I don't see why respecting robots.txt would stop them–there's no "but you didn't tell me not to" excuse in copyright.
If someone wanted to sue the Archive, they would probably argue that every time archive.org serves a file they are making a copy... which is true, after all, if anything reproduced digitally is a "copy" in that sense.
Nice point about the lack of implied permission in copyright. It makes me think robots.txt probably doesn't have any meaning one way or the other legally, but is just a community thing.
> If someone wanted to sue the Archive, they would probably argue that every time archive.org serves a file they are making a copy... which is true, after all, if anything reproduced digitally is a "copy" in that sense.
It's more than a theoretical point - that each "serving" of a file is a copy is well established legally. In fact, even loading a program to RAM was considered a copy, per MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, until Congress made an explicit exception.
>If someone wanted to sue the Archive, they would probably argue that every time archive.org serves a file they are making a copy... which is true, after all, if anything reproduced digitally is a "copy" in that sense.
It absolutely could be/would be argued. Otherwise an arbitrary library or archive--oh, lets give it a name like Google Books--would have the right to make digital copies of physical books available to the public. Obviously Google tried to do this and (although the case was/is complicated) they weren't allowed to do this unconditionally.
ADDED: Or, heck, any site could declare themselves an archive and offer up ripped CDs to the public.
> I asked, and the answer was: "it's important to fight these fights, which is why I'm donating to the ACLU".
The ACLU and IA are two different entities, donating to the one does nothing to help the other.
> I believe Us Code 108 is relevant here.
Yes, it is.
> There's obviously more to it that I haven't done research on
Glad we got that out of the way.
> but that's a pretty good start and I wouldn't worry too much about lawsuits.
Well, since you're not operating the archive it isn't you that should be worried. And given that 'there is more to it that you haven't done research on' it is probably fair to say that lack of such worries thereof is a bit premature.
> In fact, if they were at risk of lawsuits, I don't see why respecting robots.txt would stop them–there's no "but you didn't tell me not to" excuse in copyright.
Because it shows effort on their side to not collect when copyright holders make a minimum effort to warn outside parties not to collect their data.
In the eyes of a judge - or a half decent lawyer - that will go a long way towards establishing that the archive made an effort to stay on the bright side of the line.
Law is interpreted, the fact that there is no such provision in copyright law doesn't mean that a judge isn't able to look past the letter and establish intent. If you are clearly in violation and refuse to do even the minimum in order to avoid such violations then judges tend to be pretty strict, in other words, they'll throw the book at you. But if you can demonstrate that you did what you could and that the plaintiff did not make even a minimum effort to warn others that archival storage or crawling is not desired then their case suddenly is a lot weaker.
See also: DMCA and various lawsuits in lots of different locations, the internet is far larger than just the USA and there are a number of interesting cases around this subject in other countries, some of those had outcomes that were quite surprising (at least, to non-lawyers).
I've copied Geocities.com when it went down and have had quite a bit of discussion with IP lawyers on the subject. So far I've been able to avoid being sued by responding timely to requests by rights holders. But that doesn't mean they would not have standing to sue me and if they do I might even lose.
This is not at all a settled area of the law and if you feel that the Internet Archive is in the right here no matter what then you could of course offer to indemnify them from any damage claims.
A "copy", in this context, is a file. They can have three of those, which aligns perfectly with standard backup practices. Serving them is distribution, but not copying.
Fair use is not the only exception to copyright. US copyright law has a separate section on exceptions for libraries and archives.