I know it's kind of a losing battle, but "publicly available" does not mean "in public domain".
Trivial or not, you have copyright in your own writings, online or off-line. Each participant on HN owns the copyright in the written expression of his or her comments. Similarly, a photographer has copyright in photographs taken by that photographer. See a user profile of a high-karma HN participant
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
for an example of asserting copyright in HN comments, something that any of us could do, because the copyright is already there under modern copyright law, and asserting the copyright openly and publicly helps battle infringement.
Like I said - I'm conflicted about this, I _want_ these images to be available, and whatever the guy wrote in his forum post we know Google (and Blekko!) will index and download them and will pretty soon be causing them to be "otherwise distributed outside of this forum" - but the guy's wishes are clear, even if not explicitly machine-readable.
I'm the one who initiated the archive against the page(s) in question.
While I understand copyright is important, I also believe in the preservation of digital history on the internet.
The page in question isn't password protected, nor were the images prevented by the Internet Archiver's archive process from committing the page to their archive. The author still receives their attribution, and The Archive is fairly solid in the non-profit category (which I believe respects the copyright owner's wishes).
"Images I post in this thread and my related commentary are posted and published by me, the original photographer. All copyrights and all other rights reserved. These images may not be copied or otherwise distributed outside of this forum without my express permission."
To me, it pretty clear that initiating an archive against that page was explicitly ignoring the copyright owners wishes, not respecting them, and placing your belief in "preservation of digital history" above the rights of the person who took the photos.
I'm conflicted, because like you I'd hate to see those images vanish - but I now strongly suspect _next_ time this guy takes some pictures of something I'm fascinated by, he won't be posting them publicly any more.
(And you do know "but we gave you _attribution!_" is about the lamest and most infuriating thing you can say to a rightsholder who's copyright you're violating, right? And probably one of the favourite things their lawyers can possibly have in writing...)
So for practical reasons it is probably best to claim both copyright on the page and to set up robots.txt to specifically forbid those pieces that you don't want spread around from being indexed/archived.
In the eyes of the law probably only the copyright bit matters.
I'm enormously grateful it exists when I want to use it, but still have a distinct feeling it's "not OK" to do that with other people's images (and especially not just relying on the "but you didn't put anything in robots.txt to say we couldn't do whatever the hell we wanted with your pictures! And we _credited_ you!!!" excuse).
