World of Spectrum

World of Spectrum is a website devoted to cataloging and archiving material for the ZX Spectrum home computer popular in the 1980s, and had been officially endorsed by Amstrad which holds the rights to the ZX Spectrum brand.
History
It was started by Martijn van der Heide in 1995 as a website dedicated to hosting unavailable Spectrum games (Abandonware), but grew into hosting anything and everything that was remotely connected to the computer declaring itself as "'the world's biggest and most popular archive of Spectrum related material." with a catalogue of 24,000 software titles, 1000 hardware items, 1,500 books and more than 350,000 references.
Copyright Issues
One of the website's stated goals was to obtain distribution permission from copyright holders of the software kept in its archives, and had received permissions for hundreds of the 24,000 software titles available for download.
In 2003 the Interactive Digital Software Association filed an automated complaint against the site for copyright infringement when a number of titles hosted by the site were mistakenly flagged as being modern titles belonging to IDSA members. The website claimed that the case was "retracted" on 14 February 2003, and continued distributing their content for another decade.
The collection of Spectrum related publications included magazines such as CRASH, Sinclair User, and Your Sinclair scanned page-by-page and distributed (while without clear permission) until they were deleted from the server in 2015.
Current Status
On 15 September 2013, van der Heide announced that he was having a sabbatical and the last archive updates to the site were made on 5 January 2014. On 10th March 2015 the site suffered a failure of the server and went off line. A new server and new site maintainer enabled the site to come back online on 18th March, but without a forum or archive and not all sections accessible. Work was started on rebuilding a new site from scratch. On 11th of May 2015 a new forum came online incorporating all the posts from the old forum. At the time of writing (July 2016) the existing site is still online, but as the new site is not yet complete, there are still some inaccessible files and broken links. Although the amount of functionality has increased compared to May 2015.
Reception
.Net Magazine stated that the site was "essentially the biggest and best site for connoisseurs of the ZX Spectrum" and the Daily Mirror newspaper proclaimed "it contains every single piece of software ever created for Spectrum, it has full descriptions, hints and cheats. Sir Clive Sinclair must be very proud."
In December 2005 Retro Gamer wrote "World of Spectrum is not just the best Speccy site on the Web, but arguably the best retro resource full stop."
The site has received a number of awards, for instance the Golden Web Award in 2002-2003.

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