What.cd reminded me a lot of the abandonware sites.
I may have allegedly been a pirate years ago. And I may have allegedly spent a lot of time at various abandonware sites because I like older games. And those sites seemed great. They had strict rules on what could and could not be uploaded and very much took the approach of "this is an archive". Then GoG launched and made it reasonable to buy those older games in a format that would (usually) work on modern systems.
Great right? We won! Nope. All four of the sites I used to (allegedly) frequent had responses ranging from "They aren't the creators so we are still going to let you upload these files" to "Some of our uploads are in iso format so it is still required". Hell, one even allowed people to upload the gog installers.
I am mostly good with archive.org (I have some reservations but feel them to be a net good), but my general experience is that most "archive" sites tend to just be pirates who think they understand the legal system.
I may have allegedly been a pirate years ago. And I may have allegedly spent a lot of time at various abandonware sites because I like older games. And those sites seemed great. They had strict rules on what could and could not be uploaded and very much took the approach of "this is an archive". Then GoG launched and made it reasonable to buy those older games in a format that would (usually) work on modern systems.
Great right? We won! Nope. All four of the sites I used to (allegedly) frequent had responses ranging from "They aren't the creators so we are still going to let you upload these files" to "Some of our uploads are in iso format so it is still required". Hell, one even allowed people to upload the gog installers.
I am mostly good with archive.org (I have some reservations but feel them to be a net good), but my general experience is that most "archive" sites tend to just be pirates who think they understand the legal system.