Additionally, politicians like North Carolina Sen. But many critics of this approach, especially those within the publishing industry, have long argued that the IA’s Open Library is piracy because it distributes books as image files rather than appropriately licensing the works and compensating authors. The IA’s right to do so has been endorsed by many librarians and legal experts. Among the IA’s other projects is the Open Library, a virtual library that allows users to freely borrow digital copies of books that are uploaded and archived through the project - both books in the public domain and books under copyright.Īs my colleague Constance Grady recently explained, the Internet Archive owns physical copies of all the books it digitizes and claims the right to loan out the digital copies, as long as no more than one digital copy of a book is in circulation at a time. It’s the deepest archive of internet history in existence. Its most famous project is the Wayback Machine, a digital collection of roughly 390 billion pages dating back to 1996. Founded in 1996, it digitally preserves more than 1.4 million books and historical documents, as well as cached versions of websites captured over a long period of time. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit internet archival organization. The Internet Archive is a preservation project - but some publishers think it’s piracy And while the lawsuit is a big deal for advocates of an open internet, it’s probably not the existential threat to the IA that you may have heard it is. Ever since, confusion about the scope of the lawsuit and its potential impact on the IA as a whole has stoked fears of a crackdown on the IA’s many projects, including its gargantuan archive of the historical internet.īut much of that fear seems to be exaggerated. A group of publishing companies filed a scathing copyright lawsuit earlier this month over the IA’s controversial attempt to open an “ Emergency Library” during the coronavirus pandemic. The Internet Archive (also known as IA or ), home to the giant vault of internet and public domain history known as the Wayback Machine, is currently facing a crisis - one largely defined by misinformation.

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