San Francisco, CA—The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library best known for its Wayback Machine, has navigated a series of bruising copyright battles that threatened its existence, settling two major lawsuits in confidential agreements. While the organization survived the legal storm, its founder has mourned the severe restrictions placed on its digital book collection.
The primary blow came from a lawsuit filed by major book publishers over the Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program, which allowed it to lend digitally scanned books. The Archive lost its final appeal, leading to a confidential settlement that necessitated the removal of more than 500,000 books from its Open Library.
Founder Brewster Kahle described the outcome in stark terms to Ars Technica: "We survived, but it wiped out the Library." Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a crucial resource to strengthen research and link e-books to platforms like Wikipedia. He believes the publishers' victory made "the world became stupider" by restricting public access to this vast collection.
The Archive also successfully settled a second suit brought by music publishers regarding its Great 78 Project, which sought to preserve pre-1972 sound recordings. Legal damages sought in both cases had collectively reached over a billion dollars before the confidential agreements were reached.
Despite the setbacks, the Archive continues its mission. It recently marked a major milestone by archiving its trillionth webpage and was honored by San Francisco with an "Internet Archive Day."
Looking ahead, the non-profit is shifting focus to its Democracy's Library initiative, a free online collection of U.S. government research and public documents. This project aims to avoid future copyright infringement issues while continuing to fulfill the Archive's goal of making knowledge widely available.
