The web’s memory on trial What’s inside the Internet Archive?
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Has been defined the trial against the largest library on the internet. It’s called the Internet Archive, if you look for it on Wikipedia it’s defined like this: a non-profit digital library that has the stated purpose of allowing “universal access to knowledge. We mention Wikipedia on purpose because we are in those parts. Let’s talk about the open-air web museum. You can find there sites, documents but also historical copies of applications from past times. Alongside videogames, icons and software from the last thirty years, there are Mac programs from the 1980s and the sites of what has been called the new economy, that of the dot.com failure between 1997 and 2000. In Archive. org we can also find billions of web pages from the beginning of the web and over 37 million scanned books, 4.4 million of which are available for digital lending through the US library network.
The publishers Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and John Wiley & Sons are suing for copyright infringement. The lawsuit isn’t about everything in there, just the books. The question is not simple. But it all started during the first pandemic when they decided to offer the loan of this book outside the Controlled Digital Lending rules which provide for the possibility of lending books to one user at a time. The principle is called own to loan. If a book is offered on loan in digital form, the physical copy is “taken off” the shelf until it is returned. And viceversa. In March, this condition was removed from the Internet Archive for three months precisely to meet the emergency of the lockdown which has forced millions of people home. In practice it meant guaranteeing simultaneous and unlimited access. One thing libraries can’t do. Hence the legal action that blocked the initiative. Practically right away.
The judge will have to decide whether the scan of the book by The Internet Archive infringes copyrights. But if the association were to lose the case, in addition to paying millions in damages for not having paid the temporary licenses (and therefore the copyright) it could be forced to delete the copies accumulated over the years from the servers. The risk is to see millions of contents and services disappear, such as the Wayback Machine, a sort of time machine that allows you to navigate the web’s “recent” past. The fear is that a piece of internet memory could be lost. May that libertarian idea of the web that generated today’s ecosystem end up in court. However it will end we need more open and free museums. As was the internet of the time that no longer exists. The first round in court is over and it didn’t go well.
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