There is something disturbing about the apparent disregard to legality of this project, if I'm being honest. there might be a better case if it didn't include games like Doom, SimCity, and Star Trek Judgment Rites (to name a few examples I checked for) that are still being actively sold (eg, on Steam and GOG)
The Internet Archive is an officially-recognized archiving institution, and can thus take a few extra liberties when it comes to preserving copyrighted materials that others would be unable to. It's quite clear to me that if we want the bulk of 'orphaned' content from that era to be preserved, that's only going to happen via some 'disregard' of legally-imposed constraints.
None of the games in currently the archive were orphaned when people originally shared them around either, but for the vast majority of them they wouldn't exist anymore nowadays if it wasn't for that original sharing.
Even GOG had to hunt around abandonware sites for officially lost materials.
> they wouldn't exist anymore nowadays if it wasn't for that original sharing
Exactly, more often than not the people who own the rights to things can't be trusted to maintain them.
See the same thing happen with movies, the version available in stores from the rights owner is a bad transfer, likely with a crop with hardcoded subtitles. Yet the version online, compiled by a passionate individual because they care for the material has a rip from a laserdisc for best uncropped picture, sound from another cut and softcoded subtitles.
