“Have you played Atari today?”

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Guest post by Kay Savetz, professional web publisher and amateur Atari historian

For years I hunted for the answer to the question: who wrote the adverting tagline “Have you played Atari today?” Atari started using it in print advertisements on April 1, 1982. Soon after, the words were sung in a jingle in many Atari TV commercials. As an Atari historian, the question plagued me: who wrote those words?

The first newspaper advertisement featuring the famous phrase: April 1st, 1982.

My computer historian colleagues didn’t know. I asked Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. He thought it might have come from their ad agency at the time, Doyle Dane Bernbach. But when both a colleague and I separately reached out to DDB, we hit dead ends. I searched Internet Archive, commercial newspaper archives, and library collections, all in vain.

In 2021 I created a script called TIARA — The Internet Archive Research Assistant — which searches Internet Archive every day for newly uploaded items that match my selected words and phrases. (You can get the script free from https://github.com/savetz/tiara). It diligently searched for “Have you played Atari today?” daily, with no hint to the answer to my question.

Until June 2022 — when there was a hit. A book called “Graphis New Talent Annual 2016” had been scanned just the day before by Internet Archive’s scanning center in the Philippines. The book was available for immediate online borrowing. I checked it out for an hour, and had the answer I needed in just a minute. There on page 7 is a bio for Robert Wain Mackall, which says that he wrote the “Have you played Atari today?” tagline while working at Doyle Dane Bernbach.

Finally, there was my answer! Internet Archive’s relentless scanning of books, its lending library, its full-text search capability, and my little TIARA script delivered a fact that I had been seeking for years.

—Kay Savetz

What are some things you’re exploring on the Internet Archive? Tell us in the comments!

Internet Archive Seeks Summary Judgment in Federal Lawsuit Filed By Publishing Companies

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The Internet Archive has asked a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending.

The motion for summary judgment, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Durie Tangri LLP, explains that our Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world. 

The brief explains how the Internet Archive is advancing the purposes of copyright law by furthering public access to knowledge and facilitating the creation of new creative and scholarly works. The Internet Archive’s digital lending hasn’t cost the publishers one penny in revenues; in fact, concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books.

Earlier today, we hosted a press conference with stakeholders in the lawsuit and the librarians and creators who will be affected by its outcome, including:

“Should we stop libraries from owning and lending books? No,” said Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “We need libraries to be independent and strong, now more than ever, in a time of misinformation and challenges to democracy. That’s why we are defending the rights of libraries to serve our patrons where they are, online.”

Through CDL, the Internet Archive and other libraries make and lend out digital scans of print books in our collections, subject to strict technical controls. Each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for, so authors and publishers have already been fully compensated for those books. Nonetheless, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House sued the Archive in 2020, claiming incorrectly that CDL violates their copyrights.

“The publishers are not seeking protection from harm to their existing rights. They are seeking a new right foreign to American copyright law: the right to control how libraries may lend the books they own,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “They should not succeed. The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world. Copyright law does not stand in the way of a library’s right to lend its books to its patrons, one at a time.”

Authors and librarians speak out in support of the Internet Archive

“In the all-consuming tide of entropy, the Internet Archive brings some measure of order and permanence to knowledge,” said author Tom Scocca. “Out past the normal circulating lifespan of a piece of writing—or past the lifespan of entire publications—the Archive preserves and maintains it.”

“The library’s practice of controlled digital lending was a lifeline at the start of the pandemic and has become an essential service and a public good since,” said Benjamin Saracco, a research and digital services faculty librarian at an academic medical and hospital library in New Jersey. “If the publishers are successful in their pursuit to shut down the Internet Archive’s lending library and stop all libraries from practicing controlled digital lending, libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.”

Librarian: If the publishers’ lawsuit is successful, “libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.”

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On July 8, 2022, Benjamin Saracco, medical school librarian, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. These are his remarks:

Hi everyone. My name is Benjamin Saracco, and I’m a research and digital services faculty librarian at an academic medical and hospital library in New Jersey. My library serves the doctors, nurses, residents, and other healthcare workers in the hospital, and also the students, faculty, and staff of the medical school. 

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic was an extremely stressful time for me and my colleagues at the hospital library. In March 2020, the Governor of New Jersey signed an executive order that closed all libraries in the state. Even the physical books in my hospital’s library were unavailable to circulate for a period of time during the pandemic. I remember being flooded with requests from medical students, nurses, and doctors during that time, particularly front line healthcare workers that were seeking information about COVID-19 and COVID-19 clinical care information to address the high rates of hospitalization in our state. 

Some of the most commonly checked out physical materials in our library are training materials for patient care. While our hospital library’s physical collections were closed due to the pandemic, I received multiple requests for at least two such materials: a Manual for Basic Life Support, known as the BLS Manual for Healthcare Providers and the Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support Provider Manual. These books are used to train front line healthcare workers to handle life-threatening emergencies, for example by giving CPR or using an automated external defibrillator in cases of cardiac arrest, as well as more advanced skills to treat patients in life-threatening circumstances, many of which arose during COVID-19 in our hospital. Since our physical collection was unavailable, I searched for ebook versions of these materials in our database and did not find any.

However, I was able to locate older editions of both books that were available for borrowing at the Internet Archive, and was able to direct the healthcare workers requesting these materials to the digitized books at the Internet Archive. I also provided a demonstration over Zoom to medical school faculty on how to use the Internet Archive’s lending library to search for materials that might be useful for the curriculum.  As you can imagine, converting in person instruction for medical students training to be doctors such as working with human cadavers in a gross anatomy lab was a challenging endeavor to convert to a digital format.

From my educational and professional experiences as a librarian, especially during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I know the Internet Archive is an extremely valuable resource for the public. I have immense respect for the important work they are doing to ensure access to information through a digital medium.

As a professional librarian of over 12 years and an author and journal editor myself, I have been trained to always respect the rights of authors and publishers. In my view, the Internet Archive’s lending library is consistent with those rights. The library’s practice of controlled digital lending was a lifeline at the start of the pandemic and has become an essential service and a public good since. If the publishers are successful in their pursuit to shut down the Internet Archive’s lending library and stop all libraries from practicing controlled digital lending, libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.

Internet Archive Founder: “We are defending the rights of libraries to serve our patrons where they are, online”

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On July 8, 2022, Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. These are his remarks:

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library. And we do what libraries have always done.

What libraries do is we buy, preserve and lend books to one reader at a time. Why do we do it?  Libraries are a pillar of our democracy. We are a great equalizer, providing access to information for all. We also have an age-old role as custodians of culture, preserving knowledge for future generations. 

This is what the Internet Archive is doing along-side hundreds of other libraries.  We have been lending scanned digital copies of print books for more than 10 years, and it has helped millions of digital learners.  

With this lawsuit, the publishers are saying that in digital form, we cannot buy books, we cannot preserve books, and we cannot lend books.

This lawsuit is not just an attack on the Internet Archive—it is an attack on all libraries. The publishers want to criminalize libraries’ owning, lending and preserving books in digital form. 

Should we stop libraries from owning and lending books? No. We need libraries to be independent and strong, now more than ever, in a time of misinformation and challenges to democracy.

That’s why we are defending the rights of libraries to serve our patrons where they are, online.

EFF Legal Director: “Copyright law does not stand in the way of a library’s right to lend its books”

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On July 8, 2022, Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. These are her remarks:

The Internet Archive, headquartered in San Francisco, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library dedicated to preserving and sharing knowledge. Through Controlled Digital Lending (“CDL”), the Internet Archive and other nonprofit libraries make and lend out digital scans of print books in their collections, subject to strict technical controls.  Each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for, so authors and publishers have already been fully compensated for those books.

Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House sued the Archive in 2020, claiming that CDL violates their copyrights, costs them millions of dollars, and threatens their businesses. They are wrong: Libraries have paid publishers billions of dollars for the books in their print collections, and are investing enormous resources in digitization in order to preserve those texts. CDL merely helps libraries take the next step by ensuring the public can make full use of books that libraries already have bought and paid for. CDL is fundamentally the same as traditional library lending and poses no harm to authors or the publishing industry. 

Yesterday, we filed a brief asking a federal judge to put a stop to these publishers’ efforts to limit access to library books. Our motion for summary judgment, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, explains that the Archive’s CDL program is not copyright infringement but a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world.  Among other things, we explain how the Archive is advancing the purposes of copyright law by furthering public access to knowledge and facilitating the creation of new creative and scholarly works.  And Internet Archive’s digital lending hasn’t cost the publishers one penny in revenues. In fact, the concrete evidence shows that the Archive’s digital lending does not and will not harm the market for books.

The publishers are not seeking protection from harm to their existing rights,. They are seeking a new right foreign to American copyright law: the right to control how libraries may lend the books they own.   

They should not succeed. The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves. They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world.  Copyright law does not stand in the way of a library’s right to lend its books to its patrons, one at a time. 

Briefing on these issues will continue over the next few months, and we hope to have a decision from the court sometime next year.

Author and Editor: “Internet Archive brings some measure of order and permanence to knowledge”

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On July 8, 2022, author and editor Tom Scocca spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. Tom is an editor at The Brick House, the proprietor of Indignity, and the former politics editor at Slate. He is the author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future. These are his remarks:

To be a writer in the 21st century is to be caught between two conflicting concerns: the fear that one’s work will be stolen, and the fear that one’s work will be lost. These are the individual and personal expressions of the larger facts of our living amid an unprecedented availability of information, and of the unprecedented unavailability of that same information. Our knowledge and our work are caught up in rapid, unpredictable cycles of creation, dissemination, and destruction; just as I was sitting down to write these thoughts, I discovered a year’s worth of my own writing had been suddenly blocked from being read on the internet by an expired certificate.

But I could still find it on the Internet Archive. In the all-consuming tide of entropy, the Internet Archive brings some measure of order and permanence to knowledge. Out past the normal circulating lifespan of a piece of writing—or past the lifespan of entire publications—the Archive preserves and maintains it. It’s surprisingly hard, logistically and conceptually, to remember what 2008 was like, let alone 1998, but miraculously, the evidence still exists. If it’s not quite like achieving immortality, it’s at least like no longer being buried in an unmarked mass grave.

This is the work that libraries have always done. Deep in the stacks, you can physically take a book off a shelf that no one else has checked out in 20 years. You could semi-physically, or semi-virtually, flip through a long-gone newspaper with a spin of a microfiche reel. One of my greatest thrills, when I became an author, was hearing from someone that their ordinary public library in some ordinary city had a copy of my book—a thrill quite different from the regular good news of knowing that some person had spent money to put a copy on their home bookshelf. In the library, my book could be read by anyone.

I was happy, then, to participate in the Open Library project, by putting my own work into an anthology to be published for digital lending. I understand—at a deep level, the level on which I wonder how I will pay the mortgage and what I will eat in my old age—how alarming the Open Library can sound to a writer. I feel that alarm: the sense that our already precariously remunerated work might be distributed for no money at all, that the greedy and impersonal culture of torrenting and piracy might be coming for us, too.

But practically, the idea is the idea of the library book. A single copy—bought and paid for—shared with one person at a time, and then returned to the shelf. The distribution may be virtual and seemingly unreal, but it behaves like a solid item. It behaves more like a solid item, in fact, than many provisionally available movies or texts on the consumer market, which act as your personal property for only as long as the underlying licensing agreement between the rights-holder and the seller lasts. That sort of dissolving culture isn’t a renewable revenue source, it’s a path to scarcity and amnesia.

Decentralized Apps, the Metaverse, and the “Next Big Thing”

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In the fifth session of “Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web” – a joint series of events with Internet Archive, METRO Library Council, and Library Futures – “Decentralized Apps, the Metaverse, and the ‘Next Big Thing,’” Internet Archive Director of Partnerships Wendy Hanamura took a deep dive into the metaverse and NFTs through an exploration of virtual worlds with pioneering metaverse developer Jin.

Watch session:

In this engaging session, Hanamura and Jin explored the technologies that would transform the future and the world as we know it within Web 3.0: the immersive spaces and built communities of the metaverse. As indicated by participants, to some, NFT and metaverse means “cyberspace on steroids,” or “Second Life,” while for others it holds a more negative connotation. From the “read-only” Web 1.0 to the forthcoming “read-write-trust verifiable” future of Web 3.0, the evolution of the web is leading to an enhancement of reality to create new and augmented realities.

An NFT, or an entry on a blockchain, can be anything from a document to even a virtual representation of a physical space like the Internet Archive. Jin, for example, is able to create a complete virtual desktop where their entire life and memory lives in 3D, and where they conducted the virtual reality interview with Hanamura. From hacker spaces to raves to the virtual representation of the Internet Archive they built as a central space to conduct their work, Jin’s life is mediated and defined through their virtual world building.

What makes Jin’s world unique is their commitment to building with other people in the open source community in an “interesting, collaborative, co-creation.”

Within these worlds, one of the key provisions is interoperability: the ability to carry these worlds between each other. For Jin, this is still a work in progress, with new modes of interoperability still being built. In addition, privacy is a major concern – Web 3.0 provides a new form of privacy through avatars and other obscuring technology, but Jin cautions that due diligence is still warranted, just like in the real world.

The conversation ended with a discussion of the democratizing aspects of NFT creation and independent artists. As an artist, Jin’s first NFT earned him more money than he ever had previously in his career. One of the most exciting aspects of this kind of creation is the way it removes the middle person from the art market: rather than creating for museums or other art markets, Jin is able to reach their audience directly.

Jin ended the session on a positive note: “In virtual reality, you have a lot more bandwidth for empathy. There’s a lot of nuance that is lost in text-based communication platforms. It’s more asynchronous. The sense of presence, of being there with other people, you experience a lot of genuine and good connections… there’s a lot of genuine appreciation of art. That gives me hope.”

Building a Better Internet: Internet Archive Convenes DC Workshop

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Photo of workshop participants, by Caralee Adams

Thought leaders from libraries, academia, and civil society gathered at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C., on June 23 to discuss how to best advance policies that improve the ease, affordability and equity in how people access knowledge in the digital age.

Convened by the Internet Archive, this workshop was designed as a continuation of a conversation that the public interest community, including Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Library Futures, and the Wikimedia Foundation, started last summer around building a better internet centered on public interest values.

While U.S. lawmakers’ focus on internet policy has largely been directed at reigning in the “Big Tech” commercial platforms, this workshop took a different approach. Rather than centering the challenges with today’s for-profit, commercial platforms, the workshop centered the barriers libraries face and potential opportunities for them to help solve challenges with our digital information ecosystem.

Our hope as organizers was that we could map the terrain, find common ground, and identify areas for further discussion. And even in a short amount of time, we were able to do that in spades. Here are a few of our key learnings, and what’s next.

Key Opportunities

Participants recognized that libraries could fill an important gap in the current online environment, as they have done for hundreds of years offline–indeed, providing free access to high quality, trusted information is libraries’ primary mission. As our information ecosystem becomes increasingly digital, the world often looks to libraries to do even more. For instance, scholar Joan Donovan has suggested that platform companies hire 10,000 librarians to help curate their services and support access to quality information. Others have suggested libraries could be doing fact checking, building and hosting social media networks, and more. One important way to combat misinformation is with better information provided by libraries; however, this is not without its challenges.

Key Barriers

Participants identified two significant barriers for full library participation in the digital information ecosystem as media consolidation and copyright overreach by powerful publishers. The group discussed a wide range of possible solutions to these challenges including antitrust scrutiny, contract preemption, supporting a robust public domain, controlled digital lending, and digital ownership.


The group was motivated by a desire to serve the public over commercial interests, and expressed their commitment to making sure equity was woven through all proposals in a thoughtful and authentic manner. Libraries support access to information and creative empowerment for all. We understand that a better internet must work for everyone, including underserved and vulnerable populations.

As the organizers of this event, we are very grateful to all the participants for contributing their time and expertise to this effort. Up next, we will hold virtual workshops to include additional members of the community in these discussions followed by the publication of a longer report with our findings and policy recommendations. Stay tuned for future updates as this effort moves forward.


July Book Talk: The Library: A Fragile History

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“A comprehensive and fascinating deep dive into the evolution of libraries… Bibliophiles should consider this a must-read.”—Publishers Weekly

Perfect for book lovers, this is a fascinating exploration of the history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age.

Join historian Abby Smith Rumsey for a book talk & conversation with Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, authors of The Library: A Fragile History.

Watch session recording:

Many have decried the perilous state of the library in the 21st century, a situation that was made only worse when public libraries across the world were forced to shut their doors in the face of a global pandemic. But across centuries of existence, libraries have faced ruin from war, fire, neglect, and dispersal—only to be reborn again.

In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen trace the extraordinary history of the institution, from the famed collections of the ancient world to the modern public resource of today. Along the way, they encounter the librarians, historians, readers, supporters and antagonists that have shaped the library and its offerings over centuries. Do libraries last? Register for our book talk to find out from the authors.

Purchase a copy from our local bookstore, The Booksmith.

July Book Talk: The Library: A Fragile History
Historian Abby Smith Rumsey in conversation with authors Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen.
July 20 @ 9am PT
Watch the event recording

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Abby Smith Rumsey is a writer and historian focusing on the creation, preservation, and use of the cultural record in all media. She writes and lectures widely on analog and digital preservation, online scholarship, the nature of evidence, the changing roles of libraries and archives, and the impact of new information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity. She is the author of When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (2016).

Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at St Andrews University, where he directs the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a database of information about all books published before 1650. A leading expert on the history of book and media transformations, Pettegree is the award-winning author of several books on the subject. He lives in Scotland. 

Arthur der Weduwen is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at St. Andrews, where he serves as an associate editor of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. This is his fifth book. He lives in Scotland.

Save our Safe Harbor, continued: Internet Archive Supports Libraries and Nonprofits in Submission to the Copyright Office

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As many of our readers will know, Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the 1998 law that established the notice-and-takedown system that protects online platforms of all kinds—including, libraries, archives, and other nonprofits—from liability for the copyright infringement of others. While the law is not perfect, the safe harbor provided by the DMCA has been important in allowing libraries, nonprofits, and other smaller participants to harness the power of the internet and play a meaningful role in the online information ecosystem. More broadly, as our friends at the Wikimedia Foundation have noted, “Section 512 is crucial to the functioning of many of the most popular and important segments of the Internet, and the creative expression that happens there.”

Unfortunately, Section 512 has been under attack for some time. In addition to various legislative proposals, the United States Copyright Office has repeatedly been asked to conduct work on Section 512 that could threaten the safe harbor status of libraries and nonprofits and the communities of their patrons and users. In 2016, for instance, Internet Archive submitted comments to the Copyright Office’s first large Section 512 study, as outlined in a blog post entitled “Save our Safe Harbor“—there, we noted the special importance of the DMCA to “libraries and other nonprofit organizations” which rely in substantial part on volunteer communities and which “are unlikely to be able to bring to bear the sorts of resources [available to] larger commercial entities.” Then again in 2020, as the Copyright Office kept working towards Section 512 reform, the Internet Archive (in collaboration with the New York University Technology Law & Policy Clinic) urged the Copyright Office to consider how changes to the DMCA could have “disproportionately negative impacts on public service non–profits such as the Internet Archive and our patrons.”

This year, the Copyright Office is continuing with ever more work streams on DMCA reform. And while the conversation remains dominated by the commercial interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, Internet Archive has again submitted comments seeking to correct this imbalance. Most recently, in a May 27, 2022 comment on the Copyright Office’s study of Section 512(i) Standard Technical Measures, we emphasized that—notwithstanding industry attempts to use Section 512(i) to impose burdensome technical mandates which could threaten all but the largest commercial intermediaries—nothing in the law “admits of a standard technical measure which would impose substantial burdens and costs on libraries [and] non-profits.”

The DMCA Safe Harbors, while imperfect, have been essential to the ability of libraries, nonprofits, and others to develop public-interest-minded spaces online. And while much has changed since the DMCA’s enactment, it is as important as ever that our legal and regulatory systems allow library and other public interest spaces to flourish online.