>I'm not going to argue morality here with you any further, you apparently have a bee up your bonnet about this, but as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, there is no reason why this would be an exception.
I'm arguing the application of copyright law (I'm not for the law as it stands incidentally) and for the moral rights of producers of copyright law. You appear to be arguing that it's fine to break the law because how you do it makes some people happy. The same rationale (at a different scale) makes speeding OK for teenagers if it impresses their mates and they're lucky enough not to have killed anyone yet.
The problem is that if we allow what you've done (which I don't dislike, indeed I'd consider myself an admirer in general of what I've seen of your work) for anyone then we allow copying other's blog posts adding adverts and putting them on one's own website, we allow copying books that are still in copyright and republishing them, etc..
It's a technicality but important to the case in point IMO. The email from webmistress is grateful for you saving her from not having properly backed up her work, not from having infringed copyright. If you now copy her current website and display it as your own with ads, will she be happy? I'd warrant no, not until the point at which she deletes it all by accident and comes to you because she hasn't backed up. Is this an argument against copyright, probably, not a great one but still it is one.
The fact that you're hearing the positive results is going to be largely selection bias.
If you've bothered reading then thanks for your responses and for not going ad hominem on my ass.
(1) laws have been set aside many times when the net benefit for the common good outweighed the rights of the individual
(you can still disagree that that is a good thing though)
(2) such exemptions apply to libraries and other 'violators' that serve a different goal than piracy (for instance, preservation and access)
(3) in this case those that benefit the most are the original copyright holders
(4) there is a procedure in place to deal with those copyright holders that do not want their information out there
For the record, a fairly knowledgeable lawyer on copyright law in the netherlands here has reviewed the whole thing and think there is absolutely no problem defending my actions (just in case there would have been, I would have done whatever his advice would have been).
It's been up for a year, the one time someone threatened to sue (of course, some hotshot lawyer with a corporate page on geocities :) ), he backed off and became real nice once he realized that no judge was ever going to sign off on him suing for damages and whatnot without first asking politely to remove the stuff.
Laws are there to be respected. In exceptional cases - such as the going out of business of a repository of this size - you can break them if you go about it nicely and try to limit the damage as much as you can.
There are other people out there that have also made copies of all this data that have turned the whole thing in to an adsense fest complete with SEO spam tactics. That might be a better target for your anger.
Lastly, how much would you give for a copy of the library of Alexandria ?
I'm sure that geocities can not on average be compared with the quality of what was stored there but you'd be surprised by some of the stuff that I've found amongst the wreckage and we'd all be culturally poorer if it had gone to waste.
>Laws are there to be respected. In exceptional cases - such as the going out of business of a repository of this size - you can break them if you go about it nicely and try to limit the damage as much as you can.
That's not how the law works here. You break the law whether you're held to account for it or not. Copyright law in Europe is stricter in many ways than in the US (WRT personal use for example).
>Lastly, how much would you give for a copy of the library of Alexandria ?
A lot. Probably not my first born though. This hits at the correct route for attacking poor law. Obviously in Alexandria there was no copyright, it was all PD.
People are welcome to mark their pages PD (or some other liberal license; this is the legal procedure for your #4) and HTML5 should (does? via microformats?) allow a license (CC, PD, C, CL, FDL, whatever) to be applied and readily parsed so that you could stay within the law and still do your white knight deal-y.
Moreover those who wish for people to be able to copy without restriction should petition for a change in the law.
The law is an ass but you're stuck with it. I don't consider the value of the stuff you've saved (as much as I've seen, certainly not an in depth study) to be that high that civil disobedience should be practised in order to preserve it.
> I don't consider the value of the stuff you've saved (as much as I've seen, certainly not an in depth study) to be that high that civil disobedience should be practised in order to preserve it.
And that's where we disagree. Talk to a researcher in 500 years or so to get the better reasons why compared to the ones that I can give to you today.
But what I would not give to have the nasa pages about the spaceshuttle flights that I helped put out on the net back.
Those are gone forever, I wished someone had broken copyright law to preserve them.
I'm arguing the application of copyright law (I'm not for the law as it stands incidentally) and for the moral rights of producers of copyright law. You appear to be arguing that it's fine to break the law because how you do it makes some people happy. The same rationale (at a different scale) makes speeding OK for teenagers if it impresses their mates and they're lucky enough not to have killed anyone yet.
The problem is that if we allow what you've done (which I don't dislike, indeed I'd consider myself an admirer in general of what I've seen of your work) for anyone then we allow copying other's blog posts adding adverts and putting them on one's own website, we allow copying books that are still in copyright and republishing them, etc..
It's a technicality but important to the case in point IMO. The email from webmistress is grateful for you saving her from not having properly backed up her work, not from having infringed copyright. If you now copy her current website and display it as your own with ads, will she be happy? I'd warrant no, not until the point at which she deletes it all by accident and comes to you because she hasn't backed up. Is this an argument against copyright, probably, not a great one but still it is one.
The fact that you're hearing the positive results is going to be largely selection bias.
If you've bothered reading then thanks for your responses and for not going ad hominem on my ass.
Peace,
pbhj