Internet Archive, a non-profit library dedicated to archived websites, music, books, apps, and all kinds of information on the internet, has been subjected to multiple lawsuits since its foundation in 1996. And one aimed at its library has reportedly had a major effect, according to what its founder told Ars Technica.
Internet Archive might be most well known for its website archiver, The Wayback Machine, but, in 2020, its Open Library was sued by four major book publishers. Effectively, the Open Library is a digital library, where the Internet Archive would 'loan' digital versions of physical books it owns, to emulate a library. These books would be lent at a 1-1 rate with what it owned. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it created the National Emergency Library in response to libraries shutting down, which removed its prior lending restrictions.
In June last year, Hatchet, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House won their suit against Internet Archive's Open Library, taking out 500,000 books from the library. The Internet Archive lost its appeal just a few months later, in September 2024.
"We survived… but it wiped out the library," Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars, also noting, "the world became stupider" in the wake of this decision and they have some choice words for "massive multibillion-dollar media conglomerates" that have succeeded at making "sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books."
The archiving of books is a lifelong goal for many, and the Internet Archive website says its mission is to "provide universal access to all knowledge." Earlier this year, the Internet Archive settled a lawsuit for an undisclosed amount due to it providing archives of 78 rpm shellac records. Kahle tells Ars Technica, “The idea that somebody’s going to stream a 78 of an Elvis song instead of firing it up on their $10-a-month Spotify subscription is silly, right?”
Kahle tells the Examiner, "One hundred years ago in the United States, the legislatures and judiciary were very pro-libraries. Now we have licensing issues. We have the corporations, we’ve got book bans, we’ve got defundings, we’ve got criminalization of librarianship. It’s a challenging time in the United States and actually in many countries around the world, as we’re going through some political swings."
Kahle also reveals to the Examiner the ways he works with and around AI. Public domain works are crawled by AI, but everything else archived is not, "because there's not regulatory clarity".
When asked what they may try to archive next, Kahle explains, "3D environments, games, the human experience. And the digital-built experience—how do we go and learn from that? Boy, we really don’t know."
