In 1980, a man studying computer science at MIT might not have imagined that he would change his career and become a librarian after graduation.
This kind-faced, slightly balding man is Brewster Kahler, one of the founders of the Internet Archive.
However, Kahler and his Internet Archive seem to be running into trouble lately.
A few days ago, Chris, the administrator of the archives, posted an appeal announcement on the official website.
The announcement points to a lawsuit the Internet Archive lost in March, and now Kahler and his team are determined to fight it to the end.
Maybe you are still a little confused now. What is the Internet Archive? Why were you sued again?
Don’t worry, before I officially start eating melons, I will briefly introduce this Internet Archive.
After graduating from MIT that year, Kahler founded two projects, Alexa and Internet Archive. The former was sold to Amazon and earned $250 million.
The latter is still run by Kahler today, and it is the Internet Archive.
Since 1996, the Internet Archive has preserved much valuable information on the Internet through various forms such as creating archival collections, preserving physical archives, and archiving social media.
You can find Kennedy’s speeches, Michael Jackson’s stage images, and even old Disney movies from 1989 in the museum.
Using the Wayback Machine (website time machine), you can also go back to a specific historical time node of a website. Even if the website is gone, you can still use the website time machine to “go back to the past.”
To date, the Internet Archive has preserved the history of more than 650 billion web pages, more than 7 million scanned e-books, and 10.73 million videos…
Something as large as a politician’s speech or as small as a meme picture may be included in the archives.
As the Archives team’s poster says, “rescue your shit” (not literally picking up your shit, of course).
Maybe some of the dark history you left on social platforms today may have been crawled by the crawlers of the Internet Archive, and then suddenly discovered one day in the future.
That sentence came true, and the memories of death suddenly attacked me. . .
More importantly, the tens of millions of books, movies, music, websites, software, etc. contained in the Internet Archive are all free.
For this reason, the Internet Archive is very popular in the English-speaking world. According to data from The Verge, the Internet Archive currently lends out approximately 70,000 e-books every day.
At this point, I guess everyone can guess to some extent that the reason why the Internet Archive was sued was because it touched some people’s “cake.”
Here’s how it happened.
Open Library is an online library project of the Internet Archive. During the 2020 epidemic, because libraries and schools were closed, many people were unable to read books and find information offline, so the Internet Archive temporarily launched A national emergency library plan.
This project scans nearly 1.4 million physical books and rents them to readers in unlimited quantities.
This approach seems to us to be a good thing, but at the time, it was opposed by many writers and publishers.
Four publishers joined forces to take the Internet Archive to court, alleging that the Internet Archive violated the Copyright Act, and 6,000 writers signed a petition supporting the lawsuit.
All of a sudden, the Internet Archive, which “paid for everyone”, suddenly turned into a copyright infringement thief.
The core of the problem lies in a theory called CDL (Controlled Digital Lending).
Around 2011, the Internet Archive was based on this theory and simulated the offline library model to provide scanned e-books to registered users of the open library.
The so-called CDL can be understood as free e-book rental at a ratio of 1:1, and the quantity needs to be recorded.
It’s the same as when you go to an offline library to borrow a book. Each book corresponds to a person. You must remember clearly who borrowed it, what book you borrowed, and when you borrowed it.
Herein lies the problem.
The National Emergency Library Plan overturned the lending order established by the previous CDL. After the plan was launched, the Internet Archive fully relaxed the lending restrictions of books, allowing many people to download and read a book at the same time.
Such behavior directly annoyed the publisher.
Originally, publishers turned a blind eye to CDL, but this time they are just jumping on the bandwagon.
So they focused their firepower on the National Emergency Library Program, and their range also extended to the entire open library and CDL doctrine.
Among them, according to the regulations on e-book rental in the U.S. Copyright Act, if the library wants to rent e-books to external parties, it needs to obtain a license from the publisher or author.
Publishers are now biting the Internet Archive and not paying them licensing fees.
But from the perspective of the Internet Archive, they are a library. Physical books obtained through donations, purchases, etc. are scanned and then loaned out as electronic versions. There should be no need to pay additional fees to the copyright owner.
Their defense is mainly based on the “fair use principle” in the Copyright Law, which means that under certain circumstances, their works can be used without the permission of the copyright owner.
Firstly, the Internet Archive is a non-profit organization, and secondly, the digital copy does “convert” the original work to a certain extent and also provides public welfare services.
But the question arises again, has the Internet Archive’s library status been officially certified? Furthermore, even if it is a library, does it have the right to scan physical books into copies and rent them out?
Although many academic libraries and public libraries in the United States are implementing the CDL model, in the final analysis it is just a conventional concept without specific legal support. In this lawsuit, the judge also raised questions about the legality of CDL. question.
Various accusations put the Internet Archive at a disadvantage. In March this year, the three-year lawsuit ended with the Internet Archive losing the case.
In the end, the court held that the impact on the publisher was far greater than the social value created by the Internet Archive.
In fact, this court battle will ultimately not simply point to the winner or loser of either the publisher or the Internet Archive, but will be the key to how digital libraries will continue to survive in the future.
So this back and forth, instead of mentioning Kahler, first frightened some American people.
A foreign digital rights organization called “Fight for the Future” launched a “Library War.”
The public participating in this “battle” also spontaneously carried out various forms of solidarity activities.
They changed into various “Defend the Internet Archive” avatars, published posts that were beneficial to the Internet Archive, read a book in the Internet Archive every day, made donations, and filled out petition forms. . .
The Internet Archive also chose to continue the appeal. Under the appeal tweets, there were many voices of support.
In the opinion of the reviewer, the Internet Archive chose to continue the appeal not only to fight for its own survival, but perhaps also for the right to free access to knowledge.
As the Internet Archive declares, “Open to all human knowledge.”
And it’s clear that in the digital age, we still need a huge digital library.