Re: My archival project

Nobody is saying "all Russian websites are safe to browse". He's saying Russian sites are safe from DMCA spam. The DMCA is an American law, so it only applies to websites hosted in the US. While most countries abide by international copyright law, including Russia, not all countries have such expedient takedown provisions. The EU has similar laws to the DMCA, but Russia is not an EU member state. For copyrighted content to be removed from a site hosted in Russia, a rights holder would have to go through the Russian court system and not simply email the webmaster an automatically generated form letter. So unless the extent of the infringement was large enough to motivate a rights holder to go through the full legal process of filing a copyright infringement suit against the website, they won't bother.

I got a virus from a Russian site looking for NES roms. You're full of it.