Internet Archive Blogs

Micropayments on their own, like raindrops falling into a river, seem pretty insignificant. A half a penny here. An eighth of an ether there. Yet slowly and consistently, they accumulate over time. And they can catch you by surprise.

A couple of years back, the Internet Archive signed up to be a Brave ‘creator’. Brave, the web browser that prides itself not only on its speed but also its commitment to privacy and security, launched a program where anyone with a website can get paid by its users. So if you install Brave and spend time on archive.org, you can express thanks in the form of a tiny tip, right there in your browser.

Two years ago, this seemed like a fun experiment. A way for the Internet Archive to support a like-minded tech organization, and at the very least, try out something new. This experiment, turns out, has amounted to something far more significant. And worth sharing.

Last week, we hooked up our cryptocurrency wallet to our Brave creator account. Those tiny micropayments that Brave users had tossed into the Archive’s virtual tip jar had accumulated, growing into more than 9k Brave Attention Tokens (BAT) – the equivalent of $2500 USD!

This was an unexpected windfall. It was also proof that the current web, the one that’s driven by ads that know our every move, doesn’t have to be the web of the future. There could be a better way that’s secure, private and supported by its citizenry. To all of our Brave browser tippers, we thank you. Every little bit makes a big difference.

If you use Brave and would like to tip the sites you love, learn how here.

If you publish content on the internet, here’s how to become a Brave creator.

Thank you, Brave, for your push into micropayments to find alternatives to advertisements. And thank you for including Internet Archive early in your program in such a way that we have earned $2,500.

CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europol’s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europol’s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed us that it is not involved in the national IRUs’ assessment criteria of terrorist content.

The European Parliament is set to vote on legislation that would require websites that host user-generated content to take down material reported as terrorist content within one hour. We have some examples of current notices sent to the Internet Archive that we think illustrate very well why this requirement would be harmful to the free sharing of information and freedom of speech that the European Union pledges to safeguard.

In the past week, the Internet Archive has received a series of email notices from French Internet Referral Unit (French IRU) falsely identifying hundreds of URLs on archive.org as “terrorist propaganda”. At least one of these mistaken URLs was also identified as terrorist content in a separate take down notice sent under the authority of the French government’s L’Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (OCLCTIC).

The one-hour requirement essentially means that we would need to take reported URLs down automatically and do our best to review them after the fact.

It would be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of relatively obscure items on our site, but the French IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value. See a summary below with specific examples.

French IRU’s mistaken notices:

At least 550 archive.org URLs were falsely identified by the French IRU in the past week as terrorist propaganda, including:

• major collection pages (displaying millions of items), many pertaining only to material preserved and posted directly by the Internet Archive, others that include user-uploaded content, e.g.:
  • https://archive.org/details/texts
  • https://archive.org/details/americana
  • https://archive.org/details/etree
  • https://archive.org/details/gutenberg
  • https://archive.org/details/smithsonian
  • https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead
  • https://archive.org/details/arxiv
  • https://archive.org/details/animationandcartoons
  • https://archive.org/details/television
  • https://archive.org/details/tvnews
  • https://archive.org/details/image
  • https://archive.org/details/software
  • https://archive.org/details/prelinger
  • https://archive.org/details/fedlink
  • https://archive.org/details/genealogy
  • https://archive.org/details/pubmed

• scholarly articles, e.g.:
  • https://archive.org/details/arxiv-1006.0619
  • https://archive.org/details/pubmed-PMC3921810

• US Government-produced broadcasts and reports, e.g.:
  • https://archive.org/details/CSPAN_20101229_150000_U.S._House_of_Representatives
  • https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA580452
  • https://archive.org/details/VOA_Global_English_20170623_170000

• User-posted materials that clearly do not fit the French IRU notices’ description as terrorist propaganda, e.g.:
  • https://archive.org/details/GRITtv_-_Lawrence_Wright_-_Reporter_s_Clerical_Neutrality
  • https://archive.org/details/VegetarianismIsGoingVeganSantMatAndVeganismAlsoTheOldestVegAndVeganQuotesOnEarth
  • https://archive.org/details/19-04-2016SabawoonDaSimeJaj

Again, these examples are only a few of the some 550 falsely identified URLs. The erroneous reports continue to be sent to us by the French IRU (the most recent example was sent a day prior to this post).

French OCLCTIC mistaken notice:

The OCLCTIC emailed us a take down notice a few days ago (April 8^th) identifying an item making commentary on the Quran as including “provocation of acts of terrorism or apology for such acts”:

https://archive.org/details/002Baqarah_201712

The report stated that blocking procedures may be implemented against us if we did not remove the content in 24 hours. This URL was also on one of the lists that the French IRU reported to us.

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Thus, we are left to ask – how can the proposed legislation realistically be said to honor freedom of speech if these are the types of reports that are currently coming from EU law enforcement and designated governmental reporting entities? It is not possible for us to process these reports using human review within a very limited timeframe like one hour. Are we to simply take what’s reported as “terrorism” at face value and risk the automatic removal of things like THE primary collection page for all books on archive.org?

At the end of this month, on April 2nd, Google will shut down what they called the “consumer version” of Google Plus, their fourth major foray into building a Social Network. The deadline had been the end of the year but was moved up due to a number of cited factors, including data breaches.

When a seismic event like this happens in the online world, especially involving one of the “Tech Giants”, there’s a lot of e-Ink spilled about the money involved, the comparison of markets and post-mortems of performance. However, only a sliver of that coverage tends to mention the social and cultural costs involved.

In fact, to hear it often stated, also-ran social networks are almost like the embarrassing outfit you wore in school or a bad hair day – something we all experienced, but don’t want to talk about.

However, recording and preserving The Web has been our mission for 20 years, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned – it’s that it’s never as simple as “old is terrible, new is good”. In fact, some of the oldest materials of the Web, in all their lower-resolution, lacking-fidelity forms, are also our most emotionally connected and meaningful, due to the passage of time.

On Google+, and before them, on Geocities, FortuneCity, and many others, there’s always been a question who exactly the services are for. Are they meant to be general purpose shared albums of notes, photos and birthday announcements? Or are they places of assembly, where like-minded folks or families gather to communicate and debate, argue and reconcile? The answer, it seems, can often be whatever advertisers want, but in fact it often ends up being a little bit of everything to everyone, and the longer a given service or network exists, the more drift of purpose it will experience.

The biggest difference between “then” and “now” in the eyeblink of Web History is primarily storage and speed. Geocities, at its peak, may not have exceeded 10 or 15 terabytes of data at any one time. Google Plus, however, probably exceeds Petabytes. Choosing to “back up” or make a Wayback-machine compatible snapshot of these places turns into a choice of how much of the Internet Archive’s budget should go towards holding them. Ideally, the answer would always be “all of it”. But sites are getting larger, the shutdown time frames smaller. It’s a constant concern.

Also, when spending this much time and effort to mirror a site, another consideration is how “unique” the material is on it. Were these sites used to share already-available media we could get at other services? Or were special conversations and creations living on the closing site that we will never see again?

Throughout the history of our online times, experts and keepers of special knowledge will share what they know – be it on mailing lists, image boards, ‘groups’ or ‘clubs’. For many, from 2011 to this shutdown year, Google Plus worked to make it easy to be one of those destinations. Time will tell how much might be lost, and how much efforts to mirror it have saved.

The final vote on the Copyright Directive in the European Parliament is expected between the 26 and 28 March. As we explained previously, one particular provision, known as Article 13, would lead to upload filters being required on most Internet services. The proposed law has only gotten worse over the months of debate, and many in the EU and across the globe are concerned that this will lead to censorship even of legal content. The #SaveYourInternet fight has one last chance to prevent this law from taking effect. If you are an EU citizen, the most effective thing you can do is to call your MEP and ask them to vote against Article 13. Real world peaceful protests are also planned throughout Europe. Go to savetheinternet.info/demos to find out where your nearest demonstration is. Those of us outside the EU can support this effort on social media using the #SaveYourInternet hashtag.

By Stacya Shepard Silverman

Growing up, my father worked night and day on a massive project which he called The Encyclopedia of Folk Music. Dad’s desk was in the middle of whatever small place we rented, if indeed rent was ever paid. His desk was the center of our household universe, piled high with papers, a Corona typewriter, stacks of reference books and sheet music, his ashtray over-flowing with cigar butts.

As a kid, I believed The Encyclopedia was going to make Dad famous, and he told me we’d have loads of money when it was published. He said he was listing thousands of folk songs in detailed entries. There would be nothing like it, or so I was told; the most complete collection of folk songs in existence, and he was the person to put it all together, having been a singer and songwriter back in the day, long before I was born in 1965.

Because my father couldn’t read music, a musician named Joe Tansman spent countless hours creating sheet music for Dad, he was at our house so often he became family. Unfortunately, Joe was never given attribution for his work, as far as I can tell.

Several years into the project, things went haywire. My mother said Dad sold The Encyclopedia to Billboard Magazine, but he couldn’t bring himself to give them the work. He kept the advance, using the money to rush us out of town.

When I was twelve, a man called the house calling my father a crook, and said he’d invested his life savings and wanted to be paid. That same year, more bad news: Dad said somehow his index for The Encyclopedia had been mysteriously burned and he’d have to start again, although there was no fire in or around our house. There was always a wacky reason why The Encyclopedia wouldn’t be published anytime soon.

Fast forward: I’m an adult trying to piece it together. My father died in 2009, and his encyclopedia isn’t with the rest of his papers. I began looking into things I was told, songs he said he wrote and his many pseudonyms. Recently I tracked down an older copy of The Encyclopedia a couple had invested in back in 1970. I knew by this time the work would never be published. I loved my dad and we were close, but I became obsessed with fact checking him, which started while he was still alive, and continues to this day.

Last summer, I pitched this complex story to NPR’s “Hidden Brain” podcast, and an episode was created based on decades of my research. They interviewed my contacts including a half-sister I met in 2011 (one of many children my father had abandoned). While “Hidden Brain” was in production, I purchased the 1970s copy of The Encyclopedia which became part of the story the show crafted.

Being featured on a popular podcast gave me a lucky break, I was contacted by Internet Archive. David Fox, Development Director, and Jeff Kaplan, Collections Manager had heard the show, and Jeff reached out to me, wondering if I’d be interested in having the work scanned. Brewster Kahle, the founder, approved the pro bono scanning of the work.

On my 54th birthday, 10 years after my father’s death, I took my copy of The Encyclopedia to Internet Archives and gave it to Jeff and Brewster. It’s hard to put into words the closure this gave me, knowing that at least after all the twists, turns and broken promises, Dad’s early copy will be online for people to use at no cost. I was told by Jeff Kaplan that he’d already found an obscure song in The Encyclopedia and performed it with his duo. I wish I could have been there to hear it!

There’s the last version of The Encyclopedia, which has mysteriously vanished. The boxes full of my father’s work were supposed to go to The Buck Owens Museum, but may have ended up in some unknown person’s storage. I’ve yet to track it down. That missing copy has more entries, and would take months to scan. But for now, I’m going to pause to enjoy the memory of my best birthday ever. Thank you to Internet Archive and all the wonderful people who made this happen.