[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

I think the main question is:

- Why is it better than internet archive?

I personally see the benefit as potentially having internet archive stopping being the only game in town, but even that comes with certain costs ( which may not be great to the community as a whole -- depending on who you ask ).

I would love to hear your perspective on where you stand as related to other providers of similar services.

[JackC]

I think the biggest distinction is between archiving platforms made primarily for authors and primarily for web crawlers.

If you're an author (say, of a court decision) and you archive example.com/foo, Perma makes a fresh copy of example.com/foo as its own wacz file, with a CPU-intensive headless browser, gives it a unique short URL, and puts it in a folder tree for you. So you get a higher quality capture than most crawls can afford, including a screenshot and pdf; you get a URL that's easy to cite in print; you can find your copy later; you get "temporal integrity" (it's not possible for replays to pull in assets from other crawls, which can result in frankenstein playbacks); and you can independently respond to things like DMCA takedowns. It's all tuned to offer a great experience for that author.

IA is primarily tuned for preserving everything regardless of whether the author cared to preserve it or not, through massive web crawls. Which is often the better strategy -- most authors don't care as much as judges about the longterm integrity of their citations.

This is what I'm getting at about the specific benefits of having multiple archives. It's not just redundancy, it's that you can do better for different users that way.

[bArray]

> - Why is it better than internet archive?

With the internet archive, the purpose seems to be for public archiving. One could imagine a use-case where you want non-public archives, and are therefore not subject to any take-down requests, especially if they are considered court evidence for example.

By paying directly for your links to be archived, it directly helps fund the service and therefore keep it going. You would want to see some guarantees in the contract about pricing if you were to long-term rely on the service.

[rakoo]

Irrelevant. The point is that there shouldn't be a single archive for anything, because then it has the longevity of the operators. Who can say whether Harvard or the IA will close its service first? Why choose ?