See paragraph 3. It appears this exemption is valid for everyone until
2006, when it will be reviewed.
http://www.archive.org/details/clasp Nothing here about NLS however,
its all commercial packages. (01)
Kathe (02)
The Classic Software Preservation Project, or CLASP Project for short,
was founded by the non-profit Internet Archive in January 2004 to help
permanently archive classic, obsolete retail software from the late
1970s through the early 1990s. (03)
There are tens of thousands of videogames, utilities, and other programs
which are in danger of being lost forever, because they're stored on
fragile magnetic media, which has a life of anywhere between 10 and 30
years. Therefore, the Archive is working to acquire copies of original
consumer software of that era, then, with the help of our technical
partners, making perfect digital copies of these rapidly decaying floppy
discs. We will then lock the data away in our vaults for safekeeping,
until either the copyright expires on the titles in question, or the
companies who own the rights to the software make the titles freely
available. (04)
In order to allow us to do this important work, the Internet Archive
successfully lobbied the Copyright Office in October 2003 to allow an
exemption to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, allowing access
circumvention for the specific purpose of archiving obsolete software. (05)
Please note that we are not making any of this software available unless
the rights holder has specifically allowed us to do so. Obsolete
software still has rigorous copyright standards applied to it. But by
the time copyright does expire, these important digital artefacts won't
exist anywhere in their original form, which is why we're privately
archiving now and making public where possible. (06)
However, we have constructed a public database (including basic
information, box and disc scans) of each piece of successfully archived
software, so progress/metadata can be well-documented. (07)
The Internet Archive's technical partners on the CLASP Software
Preservation effort are the Classic Amiga Preservation Society, an
amazing technical collective who have started off by making an effort to
archive the Commodore Amiga's classic software collection, and are now
moving on to look at other formats. The Internet Archive is working
closely with this independent body in order to institute universal
standards for software archiving, both with regard to XML metadata and
actual disc image formats. (08)
The Classic Amiga technical developers are creating tools that can read
a disk at a very "low level". In fact, they can literally pick the bits
off the disk surface. This is not usually possible, because what you
read through the floppy disc controller is not what is actually stored
on the disk surface. This IPF technology technology took over two years
to develop, and is adaptable over multiple formats and media. (09)
We've will shortly be posting a technical introduction CLASP's Software
Preservation, for those interested in learning more about the complex
details of preserving software properly.
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