I suppose I can tell there is a deleted page Ready Jet Go!/Nightmare article at archive.org.

Seriously, there's an LOT of that shit that's still on there. It's just that there's a very specific category of people who would be obsessed with that kind of stuff and throwing shade at it can be easily be mistaken as something else

But to answer the OP's question, it's an lot easier to be original than it is to risk causing a legal headache for the mods, imo

Some of Minni's confusion is probably because of this line ⬇:

Relatedly, if TV-Tropes has those backed up on the Wayback Machine, would it be acceptable to use those examples? I mean, the examples from the Wayback machine are, for all intents and purposes, were discarded and, by that logic, TV-Tropes can't have too much claim on what the site's admins have chosen to discard from the site.

As for legal issues, someone did say that TVT did get in some legal trouble or, otherwise, consulted with their lawyers about their legal license and so they were made to cool off over it, however, that person's offered no sources to that so take it with a grain of salt.

In short, since those examples on TV-Tropes anymore and since any page archived in the Wayback Machine would (ordinarily) count as "discrarded", would it be okay to use those?

@Grey Lurker , "useless trivia" is all well and good but it's not answering her question. If anything, it's rather irksome.

Well, we could ask the guy who was coming up with the legal stuff.

But, oh wait, Fandom banned him over a blog that he made here.

You can ask SelfCloak about this, if you want; but I doubt if they'll agree to this.

@Fraudulent Businessman , which guy was that?

GethN7

Basically this is governed by copyright laws and licensing, not by from where something was copied. It's fine to copy from ATT because they use a license that allows such copying (with certain requirements), and that's also why it was fine to start ATT and Tropedia by copying from TVTropes from back when they had their original license.

As for stuff that TVTropes has deleted, it was still submitted to the site under some license. If it was submitted pre-2013 (I think), then it's OK to do with (but likely already is present here). If it was submitted after the license change, it's in all likelihood still disallowed.

Note: This refers only to concrete representations made by example texts, description texts, and similar. Trope names are generally not copyrightable, and can thus be brought over without any legal issues.

Why not just modify or rewrite the contents to be different from original to bypass the annoying copyright?

We can use the same name of tropes as the main site (like Complete Monster) though.

^ That is the recommended route per our existing written policies. Note: Merely modifying might not be enough; best to rewrite.