I don't think that YouTube is a fair comparison. YouTube very proactively tries to avoid copyright infringement, going so far as to allow copyright holders to upload copies of their media so that it be used to detect potential copyright violations. This obviously can lead to a lot of false positives, and I'm not claiming it's in any way perfect, but it more or less ensures that YouTube stays within compliance of copyright law, or at the very least makes it fairly unlikely that they will be directly sued for hosting copyrighted material.

> As long as they take down copywritten works when asked, they should be fine.

I think that's broadly true, but if they're aware of copyrighted material being distributed on their platform and they choose not to do anything about it, data harboring laws only go so far. If there are internal emails of employees noticing violations, and choosing not to do anything, then it's more like Napster or Megaupload, and less like YouTube.

In some sense, I think even ThePirateBay might be less guilty of distribution of copyrighted material, simply because ThePirateBay doesn't actually host any of the copyrighted material themselves, simply torrents/magnet links that point to peers that have it.

The thing is, I really don't want to shit on IA, and I don't even personally have much issue with people violating US copyright law, but my opinion on this really doesn't matter. The law is the law, if you break it you risk criminal charges or lawsuits. That's just kind of how society works, and I feel that IA's flagrant disregard for it is going to get them sued to oblivion, taking down stuff like The Wayback Machine with it.

Afaik they do respond to DMCA requests for the individual uploads, and they do more active curation for the collections where only specific user accounts have upload access.