Ethics of Copying a Site from Archive.org??
 

Is it wrong?

I have found a site that expired a couple of years ago. The site is mainly pure HTML and is very content rich with many many pages.
The wayback Machine has done a good job and seems to have indexed most, if not all pages.

I have searched for various page on the expired site and cannot find any current online version.

Would it be wrong to create a site out of this expired site? Am I still treading on someone else's intellectual property or does it not matter now?

Yes, Yes and Yes

that said I once read that there is only one original website, everyone else copied and modified it....that prolly used to be more true than it is now

Someday...this might just catch on. :1orglaugh

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

The first website you can view today is actually a 1992 copy. A project blog post promises that CERN will keep looking for earlier ones, but for now what you see may not be exactly what the site looked like when it first launched. One commenter on that blog post summed up the problems in preserving digital bits of human history, writing, "Great stuff. It's crazy that 48 copies of the 600 year-old Gutenberg bible exist, yet not one copy of a website made just twenty-odd years ago survives. History will look back at us and roll its eyes."

It's true that you have no legal leg to stand on. None. Zero. Nada.

That said, our intellectual property laws are DEEPLY fucked if you start to consider externalities like the loss of genuinely orphaned intellectual property that the owner has abandoned. Mirroring of dead sites almost always a social good even when it's illegal. On this, the law is an ass.

So, let your conscience be your guide. The trick is to determine whether anybody will chase you or complain, rather than trying to worry about whether the law is on your side (it automatically isn't.)

One thing I do quite shamelessly is update old blog posts from the WayBack Machine if I happen to notice the links have died. Usually if I quoted two paragraphs from a great site and that site is long dead, if I happen to notice the dead link, I'll go get a much longer excerpt to replace my original polite short one.

What do you want to do with the site? Use it buit build link to your site and pass the juice for ranking?

Then just create the pages with the most links and then link to your site.

Good question. I am sure a lot of people would not even pause to ask.

This is different from ripping copy from another domain. This is re-using copy that was originally written for thedomain.com and presumably the pages of said domain have a ? some year thedomain.com ? You now own thedomain.com, so could actually be fair game.

I would run chunks of text through copyscape and see what comes back to be on the safe side though.

if you did not write it, buy it or have written permission to use it, you should not. It is not your work.

contact them, get permission, start a site.