To rephrase that: copyright is not a problem for the most limited, vulnerable, restricted, unreplicated, useless, private backups; it is a big problem for all more useful forms of backups, such as ones which are ever transmitted or copied by third parties or the public. The Internet Archive is not a stranger to legal problems, and they’re in a uniquely advantageous situation.
Meaningful backup systems always involve multiple copies. What are the first laws of backups? ‘you will lose data’, and ‘you always have one less copy than you think’. Or as the archivists says, ‘lots of copies keeps stuff safe’.
To rephrase that: copyright is not a problem for the most limited, vulnerable, restricted, unreplicated, useless, private backups; it is a big problem for all more useful forms of backups, such as ones which are ever transmitted or copied by third parties or the public. The Internet Archive is not a stranger to legal problems, and they’re in a uniquely advantageous situation.
I am not a big fan of the current form of copyright, but it does mostly deal with redistributing and backups aren’t about redistributing.
When information is “copied by third parties or the public”, that’s rarely about backups, that’s predominantly about access and use.
Meaningful backup systems always involve multiple copies. What are the first laws of backups? ‘you will lose data’, and ‘you always have one less copy than you think’. Or as the archivists says, ‘lots of copies keeps stuff safe’.
Well, yes, Linus Torvald’s backup system turned out to work rather well for him :-)