INTERNET ARCHIVE LEGAL BATTLES

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 40, October 6, 2024, Article 27

As noted earlier, the Newman Numismatic Portal partners with the Internet Archive to digitize and store numismatic literature and related materials, making a vast archive freely available to collectors and researchers. This Rolling Stone article details the Archive's history and its struggles with lawsuits that threaten its existence. -Editor

To many, the Internet Archive is its own kind of sanctuary — a vestige of a bygone internet built on openness and access, a Silicon Valley standout interested not in series funding or shareholder value, but the preservation of any piece of the cultural record it can get. But to the corporations and people that own the copyrights to large swaths of that record, the Internet Archive is like a pirate ship stuffed with digital plunder. Two lawsuits have brought these long-simmering tensions to the courts and public consciousness, with financial repercussions in the hundreds of millions that could bring down the internet's greatest library.

With the Archive, he says, "The whole idea was to build the Library of Alexandria for the digital age. To build universal access to all knowledge."

The Archive is best known for its preservation of the ephemeral expanses of the World Wide Web, available through its one-of-a-kind archive/search engine, the Wayback Machine.

In June 2020, several book publishers sued the Internet Archive following the launch of its pandemic-era National Emergency Library, which made its collection of scanned books available to borrow freely and without restrictions amid school, university, and library closures. The publishers claimed mass, willful copyright infringement and won a summary judgment in the lower courts last March. (The Archive appealed, but lost again earlier this month.)

The same day the district court settlement was announced in August 2023, a set of music-industry clients — led by major record labels Universal Music Group and Sony Music — filed their own copyright-infringement lawsuit over another Archive endeavor, the Great 78 Project: an unprecedented effort to digitize 78 rpm records, the obsolete shellac discs that emerged in the 1890s and remained the dominant format for audio recordings until vinyl surpassed them in the 1940s and 1950s.

Here are some other recent articles on the topic, all good reads. -Editor

Losing the Archive is, indeed, a frightening prospect. "There is a misperception that things on the web are forever—but they really, really aren't," says Craig Silverman, who thinks the nonprofit's demise would make certain types of scholarship and reporting "way more difficult, if not impossible," in addition to representing a disappearance of a bastion of collective memory.

Just this September, Google and the Internet Archive announced a partnership to allow people to see previous versions of websites surfaced through Google Search by linking to the Wayback Machine. Google previously offered its own cached historical websites; now it leans on a small nonprofit.

The Internet Archive also has challenges beyond its legal woes. For starters, it's getting harder to archive things. As Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, told me, the rise of apps with functions like livestreaming, especially when they're limited to certain operating systems, presents a technical challenge. On top of that, paywalls are an obstacle, as is the sheer and ever-increasing amount of content. "There's just so much material," he says. "How does one know what to prioritize?"

Then there's AI, once again. Thus far, the Internet Archive has sidestepped or been exempt from the new scrutiny on web crawling as it relates to AI training data. This June, for example, when Reddit announced that it was updating its scraping policy, it specifically noted that it was still allowing "good faith actors" like the Internet Archive to crawl it.