Internet Archive Pirates 2005 [RECOMMENDED]

Because the Archive offered and unmetered bandwidth (paid for by grants and donations), it became the perfect CDN for piracy. A user on a forum like Reddit (founded that same year) or Something Awful would post a direct link to an Archive file. The download would max out a T1 line, and the Archive footed the bill.

While The Pirate Bay was fending off lawsuits in Sweden, the Internet Archive operated out of the Presidio of San Francisco with a noble mission. Most ISPs and university network administrators didn’t block archive.org because it hosted presidential speeches and Grateful Dead soundboards. But lurking in the subdirectories were digital treasures that copyright lawyers would weep over. In 2005, the user interface of the Internet Archive was spartan—mostly raw directory listings, FTP links, and simple HTML tables. For a pirate, this was paradise.

Kahle was a brilliant defender. He argued that the Archive was a library. Under the DMCA, libraries have safe harbors if they respond to takedown notices. The Archive did respond—slowly, painfully, and often after the file had been mirrored a hundred times. The Noise Problem: 2005 was the year of the "Blu-ray vs. HD DVD" war and the iPod video. The media industry was suing grandmothers and 12-year-olds for downloading Guns N' Roses on LimeWire. They spent millions fighting peer-to-peer networks. Suing a non-profit library in San Francisco for hosting a 1987 PC booter game was bad PR. The "No Profit" Clause: Because the Archive never charged a dime, never ran ads on the file pages (though they did solicit donations), it lacked the commercial smell that attracted federal prosecutors. It was ideological piracy. The Legacy: From Buccaneers to Librarians By 2010, the tide had turned. The launch of GOG.com (Good Old Games) in 2008 began to legitimize the abandonware market. Steam grew up. Suddenly, the "pirates" of 2005 looked less like criminals and more like prophets.

And if you look hard enough today, deep in the un-indexed corners of archive.org , you can still find a .rar file from 2005, uploaded by "Anonymous," timestamped November 12th, with a readme that says: "Preserve this. They won't."

But the scars—and the trophies—of 2005 remain.