The great internet library, in the ‘ICU’

Internet Archive It has been functioning for decades as a gigantic memory that stores data from a huge number of websites; is a global library in which one can see for free what the internet was like—and digital products like softwaremusic or video games—in its beginnings and how it has evolved. Recent judicial defeats for copyrightattacks on its website and the massive theft of personal data – also AI – seriously threaten the very existence of this repository free, open and free.

Specifically, on October 9, one of the founders of the Internet Archive website, Brewster Kahleconfirmed a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, an event that occurred just nine days after a security breach was discovered in its databases that involved the theft of personal data from 31 million unique records or www.archive.org user accounts.

He was alerted about all of this through his account in Troy Huntcreator of Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP)a web tool that allows any user to check if their data has been stolen or compromised due to a security breach.

The hardships for this huge nonprofit digital library don’t end there. For four years now major publishers and record companies They maintain a fight against this enormous repository of the memory of the web, which they accuse of piracy.

Although Internet Archive defends itself by claiming fair use of the content (fair use), in September he lost an important appeal in the US against Hachetteone of the giants that had sued the online library as it considered an infringement of the copyright he loan massive number of scanned books – close to 500,000 titles –, an activity that increased substantially during the global covid pandemic.

This book lending activity, created in 2005 under the name Open Librarywas born as an alternative to Google Books but with a non-commercial perspective. Access to digitized books is carried out under a framework called controlled digital lending (CDL) and enjoyed alliances with dozens of physical libraries throughout the United States. His sin was do not ask permissions from publishers to digitize and lend his books, some out of print.

For its part, certain lawsuits filed by various record companies and especially by Universal Music Group Recordings (which alleges that the Internet Archive infringed copyright by digitizing recordings), if they win in court, they could threaten the very existence of the library due to potential million-dollar compensation.

The alleged violation of copyright has to do with the implementation of a project to recover original recordings from old records that ran at 78 rpma format in force between 1890 and 1950. For record companies, this project “undermines the value of music”, despite the fact that it has been shown that each of the 2,750 songs uploaded have one listener per month on average. The project remains closed.

The siege on the Internet Archive may affect Wikipedia

In a complete profile that the specialized magazine Wired recently published, the veteran co-founder and current soul of the site, Brewster Khaleappears as a nostalgic and millionaire custodian of such a gigantic archive, pure memory of the brief—and intense—history of the internet.

The importance of Internet Archive and its tool Wayback Machine is essential in many fields, from the legal field (as a source of judicial investigations, especially in the field of patents) to the journalistic field, as a form of newspaper library.

A task for Wikipedia

The relentless siege of the Internet Archive may affect the open encyclopedia Wikipedia itselffor the simple reason that their editors use bots to detect changes in the URLs of your sources, so that those contents preserved thanks to the Wayback Machine can be searched.

Patricia Horrillo She is a veteran editor of Wikipedia in Spain and expresses her concern about the eventual disappearance of the Internet Archive. She remarks, in conversation with Publicsomething that is often ignored: “The Internet does not last over time”. “In fact,” he adds, “in the last decade alone, between 20% and 30% of all the information available on the Internet has been lost.” Horrillo also points out that in the coming years between 40% and 60% of that information will be lost.

“In the last decade, between 20% and 30% of all information on the Internet has been lost”

Closed sites, paywalls, disappeared media, administration pages that no longer work, abandoned blogs or services hosting missing make the existence of a repository that guarantees the digital memory of all. “For example, in Argentina, Milei has closed the Télam news agencyand with it its history has been lost“says Horrillo, who explains that in the case of Wikipedia “it affects the direct sources of our information, we cannot document many entries if all this disappears.”

All this without taking into account that there is a growing mass of critical information that is published on social networkssuch as the Israeli massacre in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and that can disappear in a flash due to complaints or editorial line, such as we have seen on so many occasions.

Google itself has recently begun to offer the option of viewing old versions of a web page through the Wayback Machine. That is, the search giant relies on the small team of this tool: there is no better example that explains its immense usefulness.

However, the operation of this tracking tool is increasingly hindered, not only by attacks from the extreme defenders of the copyright or security flaws, but for the increasing amount of information generatedand even for the most foreseeable legal obstacles to mass tracking –a measure designed to limit certain activities of artificial intelligence– and which could end up putting Internet Archive in the same bag, even though he is a “bona fide actor”.

Such a repository is unique, and yet it is maintained by small donations and the work of a few people. His loss would be a drama and It would mean the disappearance of an important bastion of global collective memory.