This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.
IA blog. There’s an ongoing court case. What has happened is that IA has a digital book lending service. Typically they restrict loaning to 1-user per physical book, which is the norm for digital book lending. However, at one point during the pandemic, IA did a “crisis library” event for a day or two in which they allowed infinitely many people to download/loan a book despite only having one or two copies. Publishers who own the copyright on those books then pursued a copyright violation case against IA, which has now put the entire library in jeopardy.
Theoretically, this case should only affect the digital book lending side of their library, but it may end up shutting down their service and library as a whole depending on how the court case goes. There’s been a lot of efforts by companies and governments to shut down IA, so they’d always been very cautious about their operations.
IA’s big legal issues stem from their novel ‘web archive’, and their digital book lending. They’ve also been host to roms of old software/games that may still fall under copyright. Philosophically, IMO IA did nothing wrong. However, their crisis library event did violate copyright law which kinda put them under the microscope.
Theoretically the web archive service and general digital archives of old public domain content should be safe. But we’ll have to see how things go.
Oh wow. That’s concerning, at minimum. Thank you.
This is an annoying event that happened. I don’t like that the copyright works in this way but fuck man, IA had to know that what they were doing was not even remotely in the grey area. It was a dumb move from them.