Enter the Internet Archive.
But copyright law disagreed. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (1998) ensured that almost nothing from 1980 onwards was public domain in 2005. By the letter of the law, downloading Super Mario Bros. from the Archive was identical to stealing a DVD from Wal-Mart. Why didn't the FBI shut down the Internet Archive in 2005? internet archive pirates 2005
They were wrong about the law. But they were right about the culture. This article is a historical analysis of user behavior and copyright norms in 2005. The Internet Archive now operates in full compliance with copyright law, and users should respect the intellectual property of rights holders. Enter the Internet Archive
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. By the letter of the law, downloading Super Mario Bros
Founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, the Archive’s mission was universal access to all knowledge. By 2005, it had accumulated petabytes of data. But unlike the specialized torrent trackers of the era (Suprnova, Demonoid), the Archive had one massive advantage:
This is the story of how a legitimate educational archive became the digital world’s most robust smuggling route for abandonware, ROMs, and lost media—and why 2005 was the peak of this peculiar revolution. To understand the piracy of 2005, you have to forget the streaming comforts of today. Broadband was spreading but not ubiquitous. Netflix was a DVD-by-mail service. YouTube had just launched in February 2005, but it was a graveyard of low-resolution cat videos, not a source for entertainment.
In the early morning hours of a dial-up connection in 2005, the digital world felt like a frontier. There were sheriffs (the RIAA, the MPAA), there were outlaws (Napster’s ghost, The Pirate Bay), and then there was a strange, legal library in San Francisco that everyone treated like a pirate ship: The Internet Archive.