#8 What is the Internet Archive?

Welcome to the eighth edition of The Daily Concept - the newsletter that introduces you to a new idea, every day.

Click here to read our earlier write-ups on the Spanish Civil War, the private funds industry, period poverty, desertification, ghost guns, food deserts, and green amendments.

Today’s newsletter is about the Internet Archive. Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, this non-profit organization has undertaken the ambitious task of archiving the entirety of the Internet - capturing websites, digital media, and more - to ensure that the past remains accessible for generations to come.

Your faithful Daily Concept writer,
Dr. Dan

What is the Internet Archive?

You may not have heard of the Internet Archive, but you’ve probably come across one of its most well-known initiatives: The Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive as part of an effort to preserve web pages that would otherwise be taken down. We can - and should - think of the Internet as a hub of human knowledge, and the creators of the Wayback Machine realized that there should be a place where old and defunct web pages can be accessed once they are taken down.

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian and computer scientist whose companies and work played a key role in the early development of the Internet.

Kahle has long been an advocate of using the Internet to democratize knowledge. He has also been an outspoken critic of Google and Google Books, arguing that Google has failed to use its power and wealth to make books and other forms of media available to all.

In 2009, Kahle said that the goal of making books freely available online is "not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen.

Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers—and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.”

What can you find in the Archive?

The Internet Archive hosts millions of old websites, books, historical documents, audio and video files, and all sorts of random fascinating stuff. I used the Internet Archive extensively during my Ph.D. and was able to find documents that (a) only exist physically in random archives around the U.S. or the world or (b) may not even exist physically anymore.

The most interesting example of documents that I used were FBI files on radical political organizations and individuals that were compiled by the late & great researcher Ernie Lazar. Lazar spent much of his life submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the federal government for FBI files on dissident groups and individuals, ultimately submitting nearly 10,000 requests for documents on radical left- and right-wing groups. Here’s one sample document:

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David J. Garrow said of Lazar: “Over the past 30 years, literally no one has made greater use of the Freedom of Information Act than Ernie Lazar.”

Garrow also said of Lazar: “If there were some prize for ‘Important and Consequential People Who Are Unknown to the General Public,’ Ernie would be a top contender.”

Ernie was a fascinating guy and I was lucky enough to correspond with him via email toward the end of his life. I highly recommend reading his obituary in the New York Times from last year.

Who is suing the Internet Archive?

Normally, the Internet Archive functions as a sort of digital library. Many documents are freely available, but some books that are still under copyright could only be ‘borrowed’ by one person at a time. If I was ‘borrowing’ the book, you wouldn’t be able to read it until I ‘returned’ it. This essentially created artificial scarcity of these books so that the Internet Archive wouldn’t run afoul of copyright law.

During the early COVID pandemic, the Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library initiative to provide access to books for people who wouldn’t be able to visit physical libraries. Under these rules, anyone could read copyrighted books on the Internet Archive website without the borrowing rules that existed beforehand.

After a few months of this, four of the world’s biggest publishing companies sued the Internet Archive for alleged copyright violations. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled in favor of the publishers.

Earlier this month, a group of major record labels - including Capitol Records and Sony Music Entertainment - sued the Internet Archive on similar grounds over the Archive's Great 78 Project. The Great 78 project is focused on digitizing and preserving 78 rpm records that are over 70 years old that may ultimately fall apart with age.

We can only hope that these lawsuits don’t lead to the end of the Internet Archive, which is doing important work to preserve digital culture and make knowledge freely available to all.

ART OF THE DAY

Thank you for reading. Please reply to this email if you have any thoughts or feedback. I need help from you, dearest friend and/or family member, as I grow this newsletter into the best publication it can be.

Yours,
Dan