Category Archives: Announcements

What the Hachette v. Internet Archive Decision Means for Our Library

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Our library is still strong, growing, and serving millions of patrons. But the publishers’ attack on basic library practices continues.

Linking references in Wikipedia to the cited page in our library.

Last Friday, the Southern District of New York court issued its final order in Hachette v. Internet Archive, thus bringing the lower court proceedings to a close. We disagree with the court’s decision and intend to appeal. In the meantime, however, we will abide by the court’s injunction. 

The lawsuit only concerns our book lending program. The injunction clarifies that the Publisher Plaintiffs will notify us of their commercially available books, and the Internet Archive will expeditiously remove them from lending. Additionally, Judge Koeltl also signed an order in favor of the Internet Archive, agreeing with our request that the injunction should only cover books available in electronic format, and not the publishers’ full catalog of books in print. Separately, we have come to agreement with the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade organization that coordinated the original lawsuit with the four publishers, that the AAP will not support further legal action against the Internet Archive for controlled digital lending if we follow the same takedown procedures for any AAP-member publisher. 

So what is the impact of these final orders on our library? Broadly, this injunction will result in a significant loss of access to valuable knowledge for the public. It means that people who are not part of an elite institution or who do not live near a well-funded public library will lose access to books they cannot read otherwise. It is a sad day for the Internet Archive, our patrons, and for all libraries.

Because this case was limited to our book lending program, the injunction does not significantly impact our other library services.  The Internet Archive may still digitize books for preservation purposes, and may still provide access to our digital collections in a number of ways, including through interlibrary loan and by making accessible formats available to people with qualified print disabilities. We may continue to display “short portions” of books as is consistent with fair use—for example, Wikipedia references (as shown in the image above). The injunction does not affect lending of out-of-print books. And of course, the Internet Archive will still make millions of public domain texts available to the public without restriction.

Regarding the monetary payment, we can say that “AAP’s significant attorney’s fees and costs incurred in the Action since 2020 have been substantially compensated by the Monetary Judgement Payment.” 

Thanks to your continued support, our library is still strong, growing, and serving millions of patrons.

Libraries are going to have to fight to be able to buy, preserve, and lend digital books outside of the confines of temporary licensed access. We deeply appreciate your support as we continue this fight!

Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media

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Late Friday, some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. As a non-profit library, we take this matter seriously and are currently reviewing the lawsuit with our legal counsel.

A 78 rpm player in the foyer of the Internet Archive.

Of note, the Great 78 Project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove.

Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive:
“When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify. When people want to study 78rpm sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”

These preservation recordings are used in teaching and research, including by university professors like Jason Luther of Rowan University, whose students use the Great 78 collection as the basis for researching and writing podcasts for use in class assignments (University Professor Leverages 78rpm Record Collection From the Internet Archive for Student Podcasts, June 9, 2021). While this mode of access is important, usage is tiny—on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one researcher per month.

A technician uses a 4-arm turntable to digitize a 78 rpm record.

While we review the lawsuit, we remain dedicated to our mission of providing “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” We are grateful for the continued support of our library patrons and partners as we continue to fight these attacks.

For more information or media inquiries, please contact press@archive.org. 

LINKS

Our Fight is Far From Over

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Four months after the disappointing decision on summary judgment in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a number of papers were filed today in the district court, and then the judge is expected to make his final judgment. We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but the full scope of those changes is a question pending with the district court. We will provide an update on those changes once the district court decision is final.

Our fight is far from over—We remain steadfast in our belief that libraries should be able to own, preserve, and lend digital books outside of the confines of temporary licensed access. We believe that the judge made errors of law and fact in the decision, and we will appeal.

Statement from Internet Archive founder, Brewster Kahle:
“Libraries are under attack at unprecedented scale today, from book bans to defunding to overzealous lawsuits like the one brought against our library. These efforts are cutting off the public’s access to truth at a key time in our democracy. We must have strong libraries, which is why we are appealing this decision.”

How to Take Action:

Stand up for libraries
Stand up for the digital rights of all libraries! Join the Battle for Libraries: https://www.battleforlibraries.com/ 

Support the Internet Archive 
Support the Internet Archive to continue fighting for libraries in court!

Stay connected
Sign up for the Empowering Libraries newsletter for ongoing updates about the lawsuit and our library.

Celebrate with the Internet Archive on October 11th & 12th

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Join us on October 11th & 12th to help celebrate AI @ IA : Research in the Age of Artificial Intelligence!

October 11: Tour of the physical archive

Please join us October 11th @ 6-8pm as we take a peek behind the doors of the physical archive in Richmond, California.

We are excited to offer a behind-the-scenes tour of our physical collections of books, music, film, and video in Richmond, California.

With this special insider event we are opening the doors to an often unseen place. See the lifecycle of physical books – donation, preservation, digitization, and access. Also, samples from generous donations and acquisitions of books, records, microfiche, and more are presented.

Register now for the physical archive tour

October 12: Join our annual celebration – in-person & virtual

Artificial Intelligence rocking your boat? Join us October 12th to see how the Internet Archive is using AI to build new capabilities into our library, and how students and scholars all over the world use the Archive’s petabytes of data to inform their own research.

This year’s event is hybrid. We will be celebrating in-person at our main library in San Francisco, and will be livestreaming the event itself from 7pm-8pm PT for those who want to celebrate with us from afar!

Register now for in-person or virtual attendance

Event details

5pm: Entertainment and food trucks
7pm: Program in our Great Room
8pm: Dancing in the streets

Location: 300 Funston Ave. at Clement St., San Francisco

Registration is required: Register now for in-person or virtual attendance.

Build, Access, Analyze: Introducing ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub)

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We are excited to announce the public availability of ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub), a new research and education service that helps users easily build, access, and analyze digital collections computationally at scale. ARCH represents a combination of the Internet Archive’s experience supporting computational research for more than a decade by providing large-scale data to researchers and dataset-oriented service integrations like ARS (Archive-it Research Services) and a collaboration with the Archives Unleashed project of the University of Waterloo and York University. Development of ARCH was generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

ARCH Dashboard

What does ARCH do?

ARCH helps users easily conduct and support computational research with digital collections at scale – e.g., text and data mining, data science, digital scholarship, machine learning, and more. Users can build custom research collections relevant to a wide range of subjects, generate and access research-ready datasets from collections, and analyze those datasets. In line with best practices in reproducibility, ARCH supports open publication and preservation of user-generated datasets. ARCH is currently optimized for working with tens of thousands of web archive collections, covering a broad range of subjects, events, and timeframes, and the platform is actively expanding to include digitized text and image collections. ARCH also works with various portions of the overall Wayback Machine global web archive totaling 50+ PB going back to 1996, representing an extensive archive of contemporary history and communication.

ARCH, In-Browser Visualization

Who is ARCH for? 

ARCH is for any user that seeks an accessible approach to working with digital collections computationally at scale. Possible users include but are not limited to researchers exploring disciplinary questions, educators seeking to foster computational methods in the classroom, journalists tracking changes in web-based communication over time, to librarians and archivists seeking to support the development of computational literacies across disciplines. Recent research efforts making use of ARCH include but are not limited to analysis of COVID-19 crisis communications, health misinformation, Latin American women’s rights movements, and post-conflict societies during reconciliation. 

ARCH, Generate Datasets

What are core ARCH features?

Build: Leverage ARCH capabilities to build custom research collections that are well scoped for specific research and education purposes.

Access: Generate more than a dozen different research-ready datasets (e.g., full text, images, pdfs, graph data, and more) from digital collections with the click of a button. Download generated datasets directly in-browser or via API. 

Analyze: Easily work with research-ready datasets in interactive computational environments and applications like Jupyter Notebooks, Google CoLab, Gephi, and Voyant and produce in-browser visualizations.

Publish and Preserve: Openly publish datasets in line with best practices in reproducible research. All published datasets will be preserved in perpetuity. 

Support: Make use of synchronous and asynchronous technical support, online trainings, and extensive help center documentation.

How can I learn more about ARCH?

To learn more about ARCH please reach out via the following form. 

Collective Web-Based Art Preservation and Access at Scale 

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Art historians, critics, curators, humanities scholars and many others rely on the records of artists, galleries, museums, and arts organizations to conduct historical research and to understand and contextualize contemporary artistic practice. Yet, much of the art-related materials that were once published in print form are now available primarily or solely on the web and are thus ephemeral by nature. In response to this challenge, more than 40 art libraries spent the last 3 years developing a collective approach to preservation of web-based art materials at scale. 

Supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Collaborative ART Archive (CARTA) community has successfully aligned effort across libraries large and small, from Manoa, Hawaii to Toronto, Ontario and back resulting in preservation of and access to 800 web-based art resources, organized into 8 collections (art criticism, art fairs and events, art galleries, art history and scholarship, artists websites, arts education, arts organizations, auction houses), totalling nearly 9 TBs of data with continued growth. All collections are preserved in perpetuity by the Internet Archive. 

Today, CARTA is excited to launch the CARTA portal – providing unified access to CARTA collections.

CARTA portal

🎨 CARTA portal 🎨

The CARTA portal includes web archive collections developed jointly by CARTA members, as well as preexisting art-related collections from CARTA institutions, and non-CARTA member collections. CARTA portal development builds on the Internet Archive’s experience creating the COVID-19 Web Archive and Community Webs portal. 

CARTA collections are searchable by contributing organization, collection, site, and page text. Advanced search supports more granular exploration by host, results per host, file types, and beginning and end dates.

CARTA search

🔭 CARTA search 🔭

In addition to the CARTA portal, CARTA has worked to promote research use of collections through a series of day long computational research workshops – Working to Advance Library Support for Web Archive Research – backed by ARCH (Archives Research Compute Hub). A call for applications for the next workshop, held concurrent to the annual Society of American Archivists meeting, is now open. 

Moving forward CARTA aims to grow and diversify its membership in order to increase collective ability to preserve web-based art materials. If your art library would like to join CARTA please express interest here..

Book Talk: Against Progress

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Join journalist MARIA BUSTILLOS for a virtual book talk with author & professor of law JESSICA SILBEY for her latest book, AGAINST PROGRESS.

Watch recording:

When first written into the Constitution, intellectual property aimed to facilitate “progress of science and the useful arts” by granting rights to authors and inventors. Today, when rapid technological evolution accompanies growing wealth inequality and political and social divisiveness, the constitutional goal of “progress” may pertain to more basic, human values, redirecting IP’s emphasis to the commonweal instead of private interests.

Against Progress considers contemporary debates about intellectual property law as concerning the relationship between the constitutional mandate of progress and fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice, that are increasingly challenged in today’s internet age. Following a legal analysis of various intellectual property court cases, Jessica Silbey examines the experiences of everyday creators and innovators navigating ownership, sharing, and sustainability within the internet eco-system and current IP laws. Crucially, the book encourages refiguring the substance of “progress” and the function of intellectual property in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today.

Purchase Against Progress from Stanford University Press.

JESSICA SILBEY is Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law. She is the author of Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age (Stanford, 2022), The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property (Stanford, 2015), and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

BOOK TALK: AGAINST PROGRESS
May 9 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Watch session recording

San Francisco Board of Supervisors Unanimously Passes Resolution in Support of Digital Rights For Libraries

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San Francisco City Hall from east end of Civic Center Plaza

In a stunning show of support for libraries, late yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to support a resolution backing the Internet Archive and the digital rights of all libraries.

Supervisor Connie Chan, whose district includes the Internet Archive, authored the legislation and brought the resolution before the Board. “At a time when we are seeing an increase in censorship and book bans across the country, we must move to preserve free access to information,” said Supervisor Chan. “I am proud to stand with the Internet Archive, our Richmond District neighbor, and digital libraries throughout the United States.”

WATCH Supervisor Chan introduce the resolution:

What’s in the resolution?

The resolution is a powerful statement in support of libraries, beginning:

Resolution recognizing the irreplaceable public value of libraries, including online libraries like the Internet Archive, and the essential rights of all libraries to own, preserve, and lend both digital and print books to the residents of San Francisco and the wider public; supporting the Internet Archive and its public service mission; and urging the California State Legislature and the United States Congress to support digital rights for libraries, including controlled digital lending and the option for libraries to own their digital collections. 

Read the full resolution

Rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall

Supporters surround Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan on the steps of City Hall.

Before the vote, supporters rallied outside on the steps of City Hall. Joining Supervisor Chan on the steps were Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive; Cindy Cohn, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Chuck Roslof, Wikimedia Foundation; and author and activist Liz Henry.

“It’s a sad day that we have to be here to talk about the importance of maintaining access to information through libraries,” said Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “We must stand firm in our commitment to providing Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

“The Internet Archive and its goal of universal access to all human knowledge represents the best of Technology.” said Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We must stand up for the privacy of our reading, the digital lending strategies that publishers want to promote violates our privacy and our ability to investigate freely.”

“The work of the Wikimedia Foundation centers around providing access to knowledge for all people, around the world.” said Chuck Roslof, Lead Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “In this mission, Wikipedia doesn’t stand alone. Libraries and archives play a critical role as part of our ecosystem of free knowledge, to ensure that all of us have access to reliable, accurate information about the world around us. The Internet Archive is the internet’s library, and it is an invaluable resource to Wikipedia editors and readers…”

Author and disability justice activist Liz Henry spoke about the importance of digital libraries from their experience as a wheelchair user. “Access to digital lending from libraries and the Internet Archive is a critical lifeline for disabled people and seniors.” said Henry, going on to explain how they used the Internet Archive to research a brick that they found under their house during construction. Using materials from the web, as well as digital books from the Internet Archive and San Francisco Public Library, Henry was able to determine that the brick, stamped C H for City Hall, was manufactured in the 1870s, and was part of the original City Hall structure, which burned down in the 1906 earthquake. Henry completed their research while they were having mobility issues and limited to the house, underscoring the importance of digital access to library materials. You can read more about this fascinating discovery on Henry’s blog. 

Many thanks to Supervisor Chan for being a strong advocate for libraries, and for making San Francisco the first municipality to codify the importance of digital libraries and controlled digital lending in a resolution. Many thanks as well to all the supporters who joined us on the steps and who submitted letters in support of the resolution.

Generative AI Meets Open Culture

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How can public interest values shape the future of AI?

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been increasing interest in how AI can be used in the description, preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. While AI promises immense benefits, it also raises important ethical considerations.

WATCH SESSION RECORDING:

In this session, leaders from Internet Archive, Creative Commons and Wikimedia Foundation will discuss how public interest values can shape the development and deployment of AI in cultural heritage, including how to ensure that AI reflects diverse perspectives, promotes cultural understanding, and respects ethical principles such as privacy and consent.

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on the future of AI in cultural heritage, and learn how we can work together to create a more equitable and responsible future.

Speakers include:

  • Lila Bailey, Internet Archive
  • Jacob Rogers, Wikimedia Foundation
  • Kat Walsh, Creative Commons
  • Luis Villa (moderator), Tidelift

Generative AI Meets Open Culture
May 2 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Watch the session recording

Supporters Rally For Library Digital Rights on the Steps of the Internet Archive

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More than one hundred supporters gathered on the steps of the Internet Archive last Saturday to rally support for our library in the face of a judgment that threatens the digital future of all libraries. 

Digital rights advocate Lia Holland of Fight for the Future read from the letter signed by Neil Gaiman, Naomi A. Klein, Chuck Wendig, Karen Joy Fowler, Cory Doctorow and more than 1,000 additional authors who are speaking out on behalf of libraries, demanding that publishers and trade associations put the digital rights of librarians, readers, and authors ahead of shareholder profits.

Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who are representing Internet Archive in our lawsuit, underscored the valuable role that libraries play in protecting reader privacy; values that are not shared by the corporations and platforms that have become intertwined around ebooks. “When libraries can’t own ebooks, how private will your reading be?” Cohn asked. “Everyone deserves the right to read without someone looking over their shoulder.”

The Internet Law & Policy Foundry’s Lili Siri Spira spoke from her perspective as a “Gen-Z-Millennial cusper growing up on the Internet” about the importance of access to quality information in the face of book bannings and attacks on libraries. “As a former open-source investigator, I know first-hand how important open and free access to knowledge is in order to address the world’s injustices…As a former misinfo analyst, I know what information is out there to replace these burned books and it’s not good,” she said.

Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, gave an impassioned plea about why the lawsuit against the Internet Archive is harmful to libraries and the entire publishing ecosystem. “[The lawsuit] doesn’t make any sense for authors, it doesn’t make any sense for readers, it doesn’t make any sense for libraries, and it doesn’t make any sense for publishers. The library system…has always bought lots of books. But now, [the publishers] are saying you cannot buy an ebook. This makes no sense!” 

The rally wrapped with cheers for continued action in support of libraries’ digital rights. As EFF’s Cindy Cohn shouted to roars from the crowd, “On to the court of appeals!”