With so many legal barriers that have been set up in just about every facet of the Internet, it’s not always an easy thing to tell if a website and its activity is within the myriad of laws or breaking them.  With so much information so readily and easily available online, it’s hard to understand sometimes that any (or all) of it is under legal protection, and you must always be aware of how, why, where, and what you’re using.  Although broad and vague, knowing a certain site’s legal standing can mean the difference of you misusing information and having a green light for your actions.  As for the ArchiveTeam, I looked into whether or not they were partaking in legal activity.

The ArchiveTeam is a group of people, similar to Anonymous but without bad intentions, who search the Internet for information and archive it in a database.  Comparable to what the Library of Congress does with physical documents, the ArchiveTeam’s mission is to create a record of all online interactions for future people to look back on.  One thing the Internet does very well is destroy information.  Delete, trash, loose, you name it, and the Internet has done it.  Although information is always being created, it’s the preexisting data that the ArchiveTeam wants, because you never know when a site might crash, be taken down, or hacked, and all the posts, comments, and in a sense history that that site created is gone.  With physical items, you can save and preserve them for thousands of years, and still have them be recognizable and distinguishable; but for digital artifacts, the medium is so young that we have no idea on how massive amounts of data with be preserved.  Who knows what will happen to Facebook, Google, FanFiction.net, or Reddit in a 100 years.  Those sites are a part of this generation and its culture, and if it’s lost, then so much insight and information about our time will be lost too.  Historians looking back 100 years, or even 1000 years to our civilization have to account for the Internet if they are to understand how we lived, and if none of that data is around, then they’ll mostly be in the dark.

The ArchiveTeam’s goal is ambitious, but I believe it’s for the greater good.  However, in our current time, it’s not as clearly commendable as it might be 100 years from now.  Many websites that have massive amount of data (important data at that), have many laws and regulations set up to protect their information from falling into the hands of people just like the ArchiveTeam.  Yes, Facebook records could be extremely useful to have archived somewhere for future generation to look back on and study, but would anyone sign up for their personal information to be taken by a group of random Internet hacks and trolls to be put into their own database?  I don’t think so, and I doubt Facebook as a company would be too thrilled to do it either.  To ensure an unbiased opinion, I used the 4 factors of the Copyright Act to see if the ArchiveTeam was infringing any of the other site’s rights.

First is purpose, which I think they pass with flying colors.  Creating a database of online information to ensure it doesn’t get lost in time and be available for the future to view is pretty much the definition of anthropology.  These’s no commercial use of the data, and it’s not being manipulated in any way either.  Second is nature, which is a little hard to pinpoint with the ArchiveTeam, but I think they pass this one too.  Like I stated before, none of the works, creative or not, are being manipulated or altered, and all the data has to have been published in some form for it to be able to be retrieved by them.  Because they aren’t actually using the data for anything other than being stored, I think their nature is fine.  The amount of works is where I think the ArchiveTeam isn’t on too good of grounds.  With less of the work the better, the ArchiveTeam takes that to the opposite extreme and uses the entirety of the millions of works they’ve stored.  Again, their use of the data is pretty passive, and in order for their mission to be of any value, they’d need the entire work (posts, stories, etc…) to be intact.  Because they aren’t actively manipulating the data, and for their actions to have any meaning whatsoever, I’d let them pass on amount, if only for the fact that without the entire amount being able to be used, they might as well stop archiving data.  The last step, effect, is another strong point for ArchiveTeam’s actions.  The act of storing data has basically no effect of any kind of market or monetary value the sites hold, but will have a distinct effect on the future, for which they’re doing the archiving in the first place.  The effect of them using the information has no foreseeable consequences on the standings of the sites they take the data from.  That gives the ArchiveTeam a 4 out of 4 score in the copyright law, giving them the go ahead to continue.

The ArchiveTeam’s case is unique in that the ways they’re using the data is passive enough for them to pass many of the oversights that might tie up other groups and sites.  Not to say their underhanded in their actions, but their cause is one that has no real negative effects on participating parties, and only helps add to the available data in the future, which many would agree is extremely important to the history of this generation.  Internet data is as fragile of physical objects, and have to be treated, cared for, and stored respectfully.  Our entire current culture is based on the web, and our identity is lost without it.  For the sake of future historians and anthropologists, we shouldn’t let overprotective legal rights allow data to go unstored, and potentially lost forever.