Abstract:
The Intellectual Property Committee under the Spanish Ministry of Culture recently issued an order requiring local network operators to block Archive.today. Currently, some operators have complied with the order and redirected the website to a warning page from the Spanish Ministry of Culture, reminding visitors that they are trying to open an illegal website.
Multiple domain names have been blocked due to copyright issues:
Archive.today is similar to the Internet Archive in that it can save web page snapshots, and this platform will also use certain mechanisms to bypass the original paywall of the website and grab the complete snapshot content. From a copyright perspective, this platform does infringe copyright, and the same type of website, the Internet Archive, usually does not save content with a paywall.
Based on the instructions of the Spanish Ministry of Culture, some operators in Spain have begun to block multiple mirror domain names such as archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph and archive.li at the network level. Some operators directly block access to these domain names, and some operators redirect them to the warning page of the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
Critics believe the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s directive is problematic:
News investigation, academic research, fact-checking and other fields rely on these websites that save web page snapshots, because some web pages may have content modified or deleted over time. If you want to find the original content or deleted content, it is very convenient to use such snapshot websites.
This blockade also shows that the Spanish government is rapidly expanding the scope of website blocking through administrative procedures. Critics believe that the Spanish government should only block infringing links instead of blocking the entire website. It's just that for the Spanish government, blocking the entire website is a simple, quick and lazy approach.
In addition, the Archive.today website itself is also controversial. In addition to storing infringing content, the website has also been found to use user browsers to launch DDoS attacks on specific websites. The website has been removed from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia prohibits editors from citing the source link of the website.
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