The Internet Archive is proud to announce that the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) will receive the 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award for their leadership in preserving local news online.
The Internet Archive Hero Award recognizes individuals and organizations that have demonstrated leadership in making information available to people around the world. The Poynter Institute, a 50-year-old nonprofit that works to strengthen journalism and train journalists, and IRE, a member-driven nonprofit that has spent 50 years helping journalists do better investigative work, have made preservation a vital part of their work.
Local journalism is the first draft of history, and often the only record of what happened in a community. But as news increasingly moves online, that record is at risk. Stories can disappear when a newsroom closes, a website changes platforms, or digital archives are neglected. At the same time, major news publishers and media organizations are restricting access to web archiving tools like the Wayback Machine, making it harder to preserve the journalism being published today.
Poynter and IRE are taking a different approach. In partnership with the Internet Archive, they are helping newsrooms understand the importance of digital preservation and giving journalists the tools and training they need to protect their work for the future.
Through the national initiative Today’s News for Tomorrow, the three organizations are working to train hundreds of newsrooms in digital preservation and provide access to Internet Archive’s web archiving and preservation services. The program recognizes that preserving local journalism cannot be left to chance: The people creating the news need to be part of preserving it.
The Internet Archive Hero Award is an annual award that honors those who have exhibited leadership in making information available for digital learners all over the world. Previous recipients have included Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the island nation of Aruba, public information advocate Carl Malamud, copyright expert Michelle Wu, and the Grateful Dead.
The 2026 Internet Archive Hero Award will be presented during the Internet Archive’s annual celebration on October 21 in San Francisco. Join the celebration either in-person or online.
In 1980, Negativland released its first self-titled album with handmade covers and distributed it through a few record stores in the California Bay Area.
“We thought we might sell 100 in the next five years, and we sold all 500 in three months. So we kept going,” said band co-founder Mark Hosler of the experimental sound collage record, which eventually sold 15,000 copies. “We were shocked that people were interested in something so strange.”
Hosler started the group with David Wills and Richard Lyons, but the Negativland lineup has changed, and the range of its work expanded over 46 years.
The multimedia collective has produced more than 30 albums and EPs, as well as fine art, books, radio and live performances that mix found and original material. The band came up with the phrase “culture jamming” to describe its approach to layering art from various sources..
Negativland continues to innovate and perform, collaborating remotely. Its live show, Over The Edge: Significantly Less Deceptive, at the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters on September 16, will combine sound, music, radio, humor, and sonic experimentation. Hosler, who lives in North Carolina, will be on stage with San Francisco’s Jon Leidecker (“Wobbly”), a collaborator with the band since 1985, while Wills contributes by phone from his home in Seattle.
Negativland has been influential in the remix space. It has challenged conventions around media, copyright, and artistic freedom. Hosler said the band wanted to carve a space to talk back to power through its audio collage art.
“The thread that goes through all of our work is that we are always responding to and describing American culture,” Hosler said. “It’s our perceptions of power, money, capitalism, who runs things, who’s in control and how the media works. We are creating this alternate, weird, parallel universe version of reality as we perceive it.”
Fair Use and Preservation
The group was thrust into the limelight when it released a record poking fun at, and sampling from, the U2 song, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The Irish band and their label sued Negativland for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and defamation of character in 1991 and, with Negativland’s “U2” record having been released by the label SST Records, the group reluctantly settled.
Negativland used the episode and attention from the media to highlight the need for copyright reform. It shared the story of its legal battle and argument for the right to make new art out of corporately owned culture in the 1995 book, Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral Two. The book led Hosler to give more than 140 lectures about appropriation, corporate ownership and the intersection of art and law at schools and universities around the world.
In 2015, the Internet Archive partnered with Negativland to preserve and provide free public access to more than 4,000 hours of Over The Edge, the group’s legendary weekly freeform radio program that has aired since 1981. Don Joyce, a collaborator with Negativland for years until his passing in 2015, was a driving force behind the program. It is now hosted by Leidecker (“Wobbly”) at KPFA in Berkeley. The first 34 years of radio shows are archived and freely available at the Internet Archive to listeners around the world.
The members of Negativland have been fluid over the years and most balance their contributions with day jobs. They don’t include photos with their faces on albums. “We really want to direct attention to our work, not to us as personalities or individuals,” Hosler said. In addition to the core group, there are people who help with videos, website design and other aspects of the art that are integral to the work, he added.
Hosler said the band always knew its audience would be small, but the members were motivated to invent something out of the box. He said he assumes fans are thoughtful, curious and have a sense of humor.
“When we perform shows, a lot of our audience seems like people who don’t even fit in with the people who don’t fit in,” Hosler said. “That’s cool. Our live shows are sort of a safe space for people who are just real oddballs.”
Negativland’s work encompasses sampling music, but also photography, visual arts, graphics, art shows and live, improvisational performances. Its work has adapted to the evolving technology of the past four decades. Hosler said a creative impulse drives the collaborators to keep innovating and sharing their work with the public.
“For many years when critics would write about Negativland, they just couldn’t describe it very well. From a marketing standpoint, that’s bad,” Hosler said. “But from a creative and artistic standpoint, that’s awesome. It’s fantastic. If critics can’t figure out how to talk about the work, maybe it means we actually are doing something a little bit different.”
On June 17, 2026, the Internet Archive hosted the National Summit on Local News Preservation in National Harbor, Maryland. Organized through our Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program with partners the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and with support from Press Forward and the Society of American Archivists Foundation, the Summit brought journalists, librarians, archivists, and researchers into the same room. At the event, attendees worked together to develop recommendations for newsrooms and cultural heritage organizations and to lay out next steps for preserving local news on a national and local level.
The TNT Project Team has released a report documenting the proceedings of the Summit and offering recommendations. The report also provides an analysis of breakout group discussions and identifies areas for future action.
As the report makes clear, a single convening is not enough to ensure that local news continues to be preserved and accessible. The Summit, and this resulting report, should be seen as a first step. We invite you to read the report, share it with colleagues, and join us in the work to preserve local news.
Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation Wednesday, October 21, 2026 Internet Archive, San Francisco REGISTER: In person | Virtual
Democracy invites participation; democracies require it.
At the Internet Archive, we believe libraries can help make that participation possible by preserving knowledge and providing the tools to explore and build upon it. This year, our annual celebration, “Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation,” will showcase the many ways people can participate through the Internet Archive—from saving and contributing materials to exploring government records, researching history, and building new tools with our collections and APIs.
We’ll celebrate the Wayback Machine and the many other Internet Archive tools that help people preserve, explore, share, and build knowledge together.
We’ll also spotlight partners and creators who are building on top of the Internet Archive’s data and infrastructure, demonstrating how shared library resources can become a foundation for discovery and collaboration. In person and via livestream, we’ll explore what happens when a library doesn’t just preserve knowledge, but gives people the tools to use it, build with it, and participate in creating what comes next.
Celebrate with us!
Our annual celebration is a hybrid event, with an in-person street party at Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco and a livestream for those joining from afar.
In person: Wednesday, October 21, at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco. REGISTER NOW
Virtual: Join the livestream from wherever you are. REGISTER NOW
Go behind the scenes at the Physical Archive
Doors Open: Go Behind the Scenes at the Physical Archive Tuesday, October 20, 2026 Physical Archive, Richmond, California REGISTER: In person
The celebration begins the night before with a special opportunity to peek behind the doors of the Physical Archive in Richmond, California.
Join us on Tuesday, October 20, from 6–8 p.m. for a behind-the-scenes tour of the physical collections of books, music, film, and video.
This special insider event offers a look at the lifecycle of physical materials—from donation and preservation to digitization and access. We’ll also have samples from generous donations and acquisitions of books, records, microfiche, and more on display.
Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms continue to shrink, close, and merge, often with no plan in place for the long term preservation and access of their archives. Online content that continues to be published by newsrooms is also at risk. According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone and nearly a quarter of news webpages contain at least one broken link. The local record of our communities is vanishing in real time.
This urgent challenge is what brought two very different professions together on June 17 in National Harbor, Maryland. Hosted by the Internet Archive with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the National Summit on Local News Preservation gathered journalists, editors, archivists, librarians, and researchers to start a conversation between the newsrooms producing local journalism and the memory institutions preserving it. This event was a part of the Today’s News for Tomorrow (TNT) program, an Internet Archive initiative supported by a grant from Press Forward. The program provides training, tools, and support directly to up to 300 newsrooms nationwide and helps develop collaborative partnerships between archives and news organizations.
Librarians and archivists understand what’s at stake and have been working to address these challenges for a long time. Local news supports a range of information needs for the historians, scholars, students, and citizens they serve. Frequent updates, complex multimedia content, and paywalls are just some of the obstacles they face when working to capture online news while still stewarding decades of journalism produced on physical formats. Journalists also understand how valuable their work is as a record of the communities they cover. Faced with reduced staffing and shrinking budgets, they are forced to focus on tomorrow’s deadline, not who will need access to this story fifty years from now. While the challenges and urgency are well understood by both sectors, there are few models for working together to address this crisis. Taking steps towards developing an actionable plan was the purpose of the Summit.
Panelists Randa Cardwell (Photojournalism Archive Project), Becca Bender (Rhode Island News Media Archive), Stephanie Jenkins (Archival Producers Alliance), Cassidy Meurer (University of Louisville), and Frank LoMonte (CNN) discuss the particular challenges of preserving TV news and photojournalism.
The day mixed expert panels with structured discussion. Panelists tackled hard questions: conflicts over rights and revenue, how to connect communities to archived news, and how libraries and newsrooms can realistically partner together. One panel focused on the particular difficulty of preserving local TV news and photojournalism. Case studies were shared from the professionals doing this work right now in newsrooms, public libraries, state libraries, non-profits, and research groups.
An attendee reports out on their group’s discussion
Then attendees worked together in breakout discussion groups built around five topics: Access and Discovery; Infrastructure and Technology; Organizational Culture and Partnerships; Rights, Revenue, and the Public Good; and Sustainability and Advocacy. Each group named the obstacles in their area and drafted short and long term recommendations aimed at addressing them. Common themes emerged from across all of the groups. Several groups advocated for immediate action across both types of organizations stating that holding out for perfect standards or reliable national infrastructure would result in more information loss. Groups also kept returning to a point that publishers may find counterintuitive: making an archive discoverable and freely accessible tends to directly benefit newsrooms. And more than one group, working separately, proposed the same ambitious idea: a Report for America style fellowship that places archivists inside newsrooms to develop preservation plans and workflows that can be embedded into core operations. Those are just a few of the ideas that came out of the event. Later this summer, a full report will be published and shared widely.
A group of attendees discuss organizational culture and partnerships
As some publishers block the preservation of their websites and local newsrooms continue to shrink, this work has never been more urgent. But the stakeholders who can do something about ensuring that local news persists, that it continues being produced and preserved, are thinking big and taking action. Many of them spent June 17 in National Harbor, working together towards a future where local news isn’t at risk of vanishing.
As our group of DWeb Camp organizers arrived at Wiesenburg station, frazzled by countless train delays in Berlin, a light rain and a blossoming gray winter sky welcomed us.
Moments after our arrival, a car and a van swooped up in front of us. Two of Alte Hölle’s stewards, Marv and Störte, had come to pick us up. During our days at this former forest hotel, we heard a common refrain: Imagine this place greener and warmer. Still, we did not have to stretch our imaginations very far. From the very first moment we laid eyes on Alte Hölle e.V., the only thing we could see was DWeb Camp 2026.
“We are just starting to wake up,” Marv told us while we looked across the property in late February. Just a couple of weeks earlier, snow levels reached an almost record 71 cm, and temperatures sank to double digits below zero. We arrived at this Brandenburg event space as bare trees, families of wild boars, and humans alike were emerging from their winter hibernation.
Alte Hölle has a very special history. Originally built in the 1800s as a Prussian forestry administration center, it later became a recreational facility for the Secret Service of communist Eastern Germany. Then a woman purchased it in the 1990s and managed it for three decades as a forest getaway spot. By 2021, the hotel wasn’t making a profit and she was searching for successors to take over. The full potential of this historic venue was yet to be recognized and realized.
At the same time, a diverse ensemble of friends who met at Chaos Communication Congress got together, looking for a place to establish a physical base to gather, build and host events and festivals. The old forest hotel was finally seen by the right sets of eyes, imagining it in a new light!
These ardent builders and dreamers booked the whole hotel for a week, coming up with ideas and ways to infuse the space with new life. After witnessing their process, the original owner slowly decided that selling her life’s work to a loose group of DIY enthusiasts was really the best option.
In 2021, this group purchased Alte Hölle, transferring the property to an association to ensure its long-term stability as individual involvement shifts and changes. Ownership by an association establishes Alte Hölle as a collectively-run physical commons. The members of the collective chipped in smaller amounts to secure a long term loan, thus collectivizing and decentralizing ownership and financial risk.
Rural Brandenburg isn’t exactly a cultural hotspot attracting scores of young people. Yet, for the Alte Hölle collective this place offers an opportunity to usher in change and a new cultural presence in the Brandenburg area. We don’t want to be a group of happy dropouts isolated from society, Störte explained to us. Our intention is to look outward, participating in local initiatives, bringing people to this place, and being a backbone for community organising and democratic practice.
The Alte Hölle collective welcomes open involvement in decision-making and shaping the future of the project. Alte Hölle’s governance model is non-hierarchical and based on consensus. It’s hard to distinguish between who lives there and who doesn’t: people come and go, but they still actively contribute to decision-making and developing Alte Hölle’s infrastructure. We want to blur the lines as much as possible between who is here and who is not, because not everyone can afford to work remotely and stay long term, but this should not influence their sense of belonging to the project, says Franzi, one of the stewards of the venue.
Alte Hölle runs as a seminar hotel for a broad variety of groups. Other collectives come there to organize retreats, literary groups hold reading events on the grounds, bike enthusiasts come for week-long workshops. And from July 8-12 2026, Alte Hölle is welcoming DWeb Camp.
How did we select this unique place an hour southwest of Berlin? It becomes clear if you look back at the history of Camp and the principles that guide our decisions.
Since our first outdoor convening, we’ve aspired to work closely with our venue’s stewards to help improve the land. We did so at the Mushroom Farm in 2019, when we brought stable internet to the remote California coastal location by building a tower and installing antennas across the property to establish a local mesh network. We want DWeb Camp to be firmly grounded in a place. A place with history, community, strong values, and aspirations. A place that shares our principles of giving agency to people, distributing value and power broadly. DWeb seeks to achieve this in the digital realm; Alte Hölle does so in a collectively-run 100,000 square meters of forest and field.
In November, we sent an email to share our ideas and explore the possibility of hosting Camp at Alte Hölle. Marv was the first to see our inquiry. As I read that email, a few things immediately just clicked. The right values, talks and workshops with interesting content and initiatives. I sent a very enthusiastic reply, and a couple of weeks later we were walking the place together with a first exploratory delegation from DWeb.
Then in February, a dozen members of our team convened to survey the site and start planning the details.
Marv of Alte Holle pointing out power, connectivity, and other features of the 100,000 square meters of the property.
So now, the organizing machine is in full motion. We are meeting the vibrant culture of Alte Hölle with the joyful spirit of DWeb Camp. Not only will we have a lot of infrastructure to build, but also many things to make! Using wood sourced from local forests, we plan to craft benches, tables, and some other key structures we’ll need at camp.
The DWeb and Department of Decentralization organizers and the Alte Hölle community are looking forward to welcoming you to this land of rich history and abundant promise.
As Franzi shared, I love the idea and the principles behind DWeb Camp, and I am really looking forward to having an international event with many people coming from all around the world!
At the legendary c-base, technologists, activists, and artists gathered to shape the next chapter of the decentralized web.
c-base is a space station that “crashed” and is being reconstructed along the Spree river by a group of Berlin hackers. Some call it the mother of all hackerspaces.
On a gray February morning in Berlin, people wandered down a dark ramp into a space station.
Not a metaphorical one—at least not entirely. c-base, with its blinking lights, maze of cables, and decades of hacker lore, has long described itself as a space station that crashed on Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Since the mid-1990s it has been a gathering place for coders and tinkerers who prefer to build the future themselves rather than wait for it to arrive.
On this particular morning, they had come to design something new.
In February, an invitation had circulated across Europe’s decentralized technology networks: come to c-base and help shape the next DWeb Camp, a five-day gathering that will take place this July in the forests of Brandenburg.
There was no fixed agenda, and no finished plan.
Just a question.
If we were to build the next version of DWeb Camp together, what might it look like?
Before long, the room filled. Peer-to-peer developers had come from Edinburgh, free-software advocates from Berlin, privacy-first technologists from Shanghai, and policy thinkers from Copenhagen. Artists, funders, open-source builders, and organizers filtered in carrying laptops and winter coats. Most of them had never met before.
They had come not just to attend—but to help build something.
The timing was not accidental. Across the world, the systems shaping the internet—and increasingly public life—are consolidating. Governments tighten control. Platforms encroach on our privacy. The internet as we know it is splintering, and along with it, our consensus about what is true. For many in the room that morning, the pressing question was can we restructure the web before it hardens into something more destructive than its early architects ever imagined?
DWeb Camp, first held in Northern California in 2019, grew out of that concern. The gathering was conceived as a place where technologists, artists, organizers, and policymakers might come together to begin building a more decentralized web.
A web built less like a pyramid and more like a forest. Distributed. Resilient. Sharing resources underground.
This summer, DWeb Camp’s theme is “Root Systems,” and it moves to Europe for the first time. The meeting at c-base was an early step in imagining what might grow there.
For an hour, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle answered the questions of DWeb Sr. Organizer, Wendy Hanamura, in a wide-ranging chat about public AI, his successes and failures, and the imperative for decentralization in this political moment.
Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.
“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”
Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.
“A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”
Collective Intelligence
At c-base, Kahle and a dozen core organizers didn’t arrive with a finished program. Instead they facilitated breakout conversations, solicited unconference topics, and most importantly, listened.
Throughout the day, small circles formed across the space station, and similar themes surfaced again and again.
Not everything, participants suggested, needs to scale to billions of users. Perhaps some of the most important decentralized tools will serve smaller networks—families, communities, groups of collaborators who know one another. An intimate web, as some people called it, rather than the global one.
Others spoke about shared infrastructure in a broader sense: not just software, but the resources communities could distribute. Buildings. Time. Convenings. Knowledge. The question, several people suggested, was not simply how to build better tools but how to sustain the ecosystems that allow those tools to exist.
Hölke Brammer, of the Hypercerts Foundation, offered a framework that drew nods around the table.
“It’s said, first you need the values,” he recited. “Then governance. Then the right incentives. And finally the technology to build it.”
DWeb Camp tries to bring all of those layers together in the same place at the same time. Which means inviting not just engineers but researchers, economists and storytellers.
Marek Tuszynski, co-founder of Tactical Tech, offered a wry observation about how the technology world often divides itself.
“They say technology is inspired in San Francisco,” he recounted. “It’s built in China. And criticized in Europe.”
The challenge, he suggested, was to move beyond those boxes—to collaborate across them.
Later, when participants were asked what would make the camp most valuable, one answer surfaced repeatedly.
“To find the people I want to work with after Camp,” someone said, “and figure out how to keep working together on an on-going basis.”
Grounded in Place
Franzi and Marv, two of the stewards of the Alte Holle Collective, share the terrain of the 100,000 sq. meters retreat site.
DWeb Camp has always been shaped by the places where it occurs.
When organizers began looking for a European site, they eventually settled on Alte Hölle, a forested property in Brandenburg about an hour southwest of Berlin.
The decision had as much to do with the people stewarding the land as with the landscape itself.
In 2021, a collective of friends who met at Chaos Communications Camp purchased the property—once a Stasi recreation site—with the intention of turning it into a long-term gathering place for artists, hackers, and activists.
Their question was straightforward.
Why build a camp only to dismantle it a few days later? Why not create infrastructure that could remain?
Two of the site’s stewards, Franzi and Marv, joined the gathering at c-base. Rather than simply presenting the site, they participated in the discussions, listening carefully to the people who will soon gather there.
“We share a lot of the same values,” they said. “We are a volunteer group that supports [you] and is an ally for [your] event.”
The goal, for DWeb organizers, is not merely to occupy Alte Hölle but to contribute to it—to plant something, rather than simply passing through.
The field where some 700+ campers will pitch their tents in Brandenburg.
Partners with Principles
Afri of Department of Decentralization demonstrates the programmable badge his team is developing for DWeb Camp. Via radio waves, you will be able to talk person to person at Camp, without going to the cloud or WIFI.
Strong collaborators don’t just support your vision. They push you to live up to it.
Berlin’s Department of Decentralization (DoD)—a collective formed after organizing ETHBerlin in 2018—has encouraged DWeb Camp organizers to align our tools more closely with our principles. That means prioritizing open-source infrastructure wherever possible.
Tickets will be sold through PreTix. The schedule will run on PreTalx. Collaborative documents will live on CryptPad. Camp communications will be via Matrix.
Tools designed with privacy and security in mind. Not just talking about decentralization, but practicing it.
Building Across Borders
Some of the organizers of DWeb Camp from Alte Hölle, Department of Decentralization and the Internet Archive came together at c-base in February to plan for July.
Based across North America and Europe, the organizers of DWeb Camp 2026 have lineages that span the globe—Nigeria, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, Canada, Japan, and the United States. We come from different political contexts. Different assumptions about technology. Different cultural norms. The challenge–and the promise–is to weave those perspectives into something coherent, yet distinct.
Toward the end of the day at c-base, Kahle returned to a theme that was disarmingly simple.
Welcome.
“This is a really special community…they welcomed me twenty years ago,” he said. “You may not be aware of the effect you have by saying ‘welcome’ to somebody from a foreign place. I think it is a hallmark of a community that is living and thriving.”
That small gesture, he suggested, can shape the direction of entire communities. “I hope that DWeb Camp is to your liking, if it’s not, say so, and let’s basically make it better. Let’s build something together.”
Because DWeb Camp has never been a finished product.
It is something closer to a living system. It’s shaped by the people who show up, the relationships they form, and the ideas that take hold.
And in the forests of Brandenburg this July, those connections—technical, social, and human—will begin to spread beneath the surface.
Like any root system, their real strength may lie in what we cannot see.
Join Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and the Poynter Institute for the National Summit on Local News Preservation. This event will bring together the producers, preservers, and users of local news to develop collaborative, scalable solutions to address the urgent preservation challenges presented by the rapidly changing local news landscape.
This free, in-person event will be held on June 17, 2026 in conjunction with the IRE 2026 Conference in National Harbor, Maryland just outside of Washington, DC.
Through panels, presentations, and facilitated discussions, Summit attendees will:
Discover proven strategies and partnerships behind successful local news preservation initiatives
Shape recommendations for local news preservation to be distributed nationally to newsrooms and memory institutions
Network with leaders from news and cultural heritage organizations
Explore tools and programs that can support the preservation and access of local digital news assets
This event is part of Today’s News for Tomorrow, a program supported by Press Forward. Additional support for the Summit has been provided by the Society of American Archivists Foundation.
This week, Internet Archive celebrated Public Domain Day with a lively mix of ideas, art, and community. Session recordings are now available to revisit or discover the highlights.
In our daytime virtual session, we invited audiences to step into The Case of the Disappearing Copyright, a playful, thought-provoking celebration of the works newly freed into the public domain. Watch the recording.
Our in-person party turned Public Domain Day into a lively celebration of art, film, and the public domain. Artist in residence Cindy Rehm shared The Seers, her public-domain–inspired work, followed by a screening of the winning films and honorable mentions from the Public Domain Film Remix Contest. Watch the livestream.
Luke Hogg moderates a panel with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Vint Cerf of Google, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Jon Stokes of Ars Technica on Oct. 27, 2025. (Foundation for American Innovation, Washington D.C.)
At Wayback to the Future: Celebrating the Open Web in Washington D.C., some of the internet’s founding figures gathered to reflect on what went wrong—and what might still be saved.
Hosted by the Foundation for American Innovation in the historic Riggs Library at Georgetown University, the panel brought together Vint Cerf (Google), Cindy Cohn (EFF), Jon Stokes (Ars Technica), and the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle.
The conversation, moderated by Luke Hogg, focused on what the group called the “three Cs” behind the web’s decline: centralization, copyright, and competition. While the early web promised connection and creativity, today’s internet, they warned, is increasingly fragmented, paywalled, and dominated by a few powerful platforms.
Speaking beneath shelves of century-old books, Brewster Kahle posed a simple but urgent question: “Do we have these books on the internet anywhere?” His answer—“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free”—captured the tension at the heart of the conversation.
As libraries and users lose access to information locked behind corporate and legal barriers, Kahle called for a renewed commitment to an open, decentralized web: “Let’s have a game with many winners.”
The Internet Archive, now having preserved over one trillion webpages, continues to model that vision by building a more resilient, distributed digital library—one where knowledge remains accessible to all.
