The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself
https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-memory-wayback-machine-lawsuits/
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«the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts.
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the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion.
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But the Internet Archive also has its foes. Since 2020, it’s been mired in legal battles. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, book publishers complained that the nonprofit infringed on copyright by loaning out digitized versions of physical books. In UMG Recordings v. Internet Archive, music labels have alleged that the Internet Archive infringed on copyright by digitizing recordings.
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The combined weight of these legal cases threatens to crush the Internet Archive. The UMG case could prove existential, with potential fines running into the hundreds of millions. The internet has entrusted its collective memory to this one idiosyncratic institution. It now faces the prospect of losing it all.
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For years, publishers ignored the Internet Archive’s book-scanning spree. Finally, during the pandemic, after the Internet Archive took one liberty too many with its approach to CDL, they snapped.
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After the lawsuit was filed, over a thousand writers signed a letter in support of libraries and the Internet Archive to be able to loan digital books, including Naomi Klein and Daniel Ellsberg.
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The shows of support didn’t matter. The publishers didn’t back down.
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The other lawsuit may be far harder to survive. In 2023, several major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony, and Capitol, sued the Internet Archive over its Great 78 Project, a digital archive of a niche collection of recordings of albums in the obsolete record format known as 78s, which was used from the 1890s to the late 1950s.
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As with the book publishing case, the Internet Archive’s defense hinges on fair use.
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In Kahle’s view, the Internet Archive’s legal challenges are part of a larger story about beleaguered libraries in the United States. He likes to frame his plight as a battle against a cadre of nefarious publishers, one piece of a larger struggle to wrest back the right to own books in the digital age. (Get him started on the topic, and he’ll likely point out that both ebook distributor OverDrive and publishing company Simon & Schuster are owned by the global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.) He’s keenly aware that everything he has built is in danger. “It’s the time of Orwell but with corporations,” Kahle says. “It’s scary.”
Losing the Archive is, indeed, a frightening prospect.
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But as opposition to rampant AI data scraping grows, the Internet Archive may yet face a new obstacle: If regulators and lawmakers are clumsy in attempts to curb permissionless AI web scraping, it could kneecap services like the Wayback Machine, which functions precisely because it can trawl and reproduce vast amounts of data.»
Mise à jour du
Deux jours après avoir créé ici ce marque page, Internet Archive était victime d’une cyberattaque:
«Son fondateur affirme qu’une cyberattaque majeure a entraîné une fuite de données qui pourrait potentiellement concerner des millions d’internautes.»
— https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2111535/site-internet-archives-pirate-ddos-cyberattaque