The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the ephemeral culture of the web, and “exercising our right to remember.” It is an Internet Library, collecting information and material, and making it easily searchable and accessible to its members and patrons. The Internet Archive operates out of San Francisco, and was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle. Kahle is an MIT graduate who was an entrepreneur pioneering various other search software such as WAIS and Alexa, before selling these for profit companies to fund the launch of the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has expanded over the years and now hosts more than three petabytes of information, which amounts to 150 times the amount of information housed in the Library of Congress. This information is broken up into five categories—Text, Moving Image, Audio, Software, and Web. The text archive draws heavily on partnerships with the Library of Congress and Project Gutenberg, as well as other public and university libraries. The moving image archive houses classic films in the public domain, TV shows, newsreels, cartoons, and government videos. The audio archive includes radio programs, audio books, lectures, podcasts, and the live music archive which contains concerts by a variety of bands. The web category takes shape in the form of the Wayback Machine, a sort of time capsule which holds more than 150 billion webpages dating back to 1996. The archive systematically and routinely crawls the web capturing the internet in time so that it can be looked back upon and studied even after pages have changed and been shut down.
The Wayback Machine is, however, where the Internet Archive often treads a dangerous line in terms of copyright infringement, as it caches and displays other people’s works without permission or licensing. In 2005 the archive was in fact sued for copyright infringement by Healthcare Advocates. Healthcare Advocates had previously been involved in another lawsuit in which old versions of their website, which had been retrieved using the Wayback Machine, were used against them in court. The Internet Archive operates off of an opt-out rather than opt-in policy, and so will ignore any pages with the directive robots.txt written into them. Healthcare Advocates testified to having included this instruction, and yet the law firm had managed to access its pages nonetheless, apparently by firing repeated requests for the information, a small portion of which went through. Thus Healthcare Advocates sued the law firm for violating the DMCA by circumventing DRM in addition to its copyright complaint against the Internet Archive. The case was ultimately settled out of court, preventing a court decision that would have cleared up some of the grey area surrounding caching of information for archiving purposes, but it is likely, based on other cases, that the archive’s use would have been deemed fair use.
Aside from its copyright concerns, the Internet Archive finds itself often fighting for status as a library rather than a search engine. The US affords many provisions to protect and enable libraries in their archiving work, and the Internet Archive feels it needs the same provisions in order to fulfill its goal to the utmost. While the Archive was officially recognized as a library by the state of California in 2007, previous legislation specifically excluded digital libraries from the legal classification. The Copyright Act of 1998 exempted libraries from copyright infringement so long as they were acting under certain conditions in service of the public good. However, it limited the classification of library to those institutions operating out of a physical premise. Because of how accessible the internet is, it allows nearly anyone to set up some sort of digital archive or library, and so the statute could not extend to cover all of these cases, but at the same time it excluded large-scale archive endeavors such as the Internet Archive. While the Internet Archive is not included in this designation, it has been able to go far beyond the digitization projects taken on by physical institutions such as the Library of Congress which strove to digitize its holdings, but never accomplished anywhere close to the amount of information stored by the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive found itself again facing the importance of being recognized as a library in 2007 when it was issued a National Security Letter (NSL) by the FBI. The FBI issues about 50,000 NSLs a year, all of which mandate silence by the recipient and do not require any sort of court order. The Patriot Act, however, protects libraries from having to respond to these inquests as they are authorized to protect their patrons’ privacy. Thus when the Internet Archive was served with a letter requesting the name, address, and online activity of a user, Brewster Kahle felt it his duty in the tradition of librarians, to fight back and resist the letter. Represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, he also claimed that the gag order was unconstitutional. Remarkably, the FBI withdrew the letter and dropped the gag order, making it only the third time ever that they had retracted a NSL. Kahle was recognized for his fight for civil liberties, and he was overjoyed with the success of the battle, having accomplished his goal of showing others that these notices are something that can be pushed back against and fought.
Kahle’s activism extends into the realm of copyright as well. The current copyright laws, especially those regarding Orphan Works, seem unjust to those such as the archive who are dedicated to opening up knowledge and information and exposing it to public access. In 2005 Kahle, in partnership with another film archive, filed Kahle v. Ashcroft, a suit claiming that that current copyright laws were unconstitutional due to the ever-lengthening terms of copyright combined with the fact that copyright holders were no longer required to register their claims. The judge, however, dismissed the case without hearing arguments referencing the decision of the previous case Eldred v. Ashcroft in which the decision had been against Kahle’s claims. The fight continues and so does the Internet Archive continue to grow, ever expanding exponentially despite restrictions.
The next time I read a weblog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I imply, I do know it was my option to learn, but I truly thought youd have one thing fascinating to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you can fix if you werent too busy in search of attention.