lawsuit | Internet Archive Blogs (2024)

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Caralee Adams

lawsuit | Internet Archive Blogs (1)

In the wake of a rapid-fire cyberattack on the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle reassured participants at the 2024 Library Leaders Forum that the organization’s data is safe, and employees are working around the clock to fully restore services.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

“It’s been a little challenging,” said Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian on being hit on October 8 with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. “We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach towards rebuilding and strengthening our defenses. Our priority is to ensure that the Internet Archive is stronger and more secure.”

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is up and running, Kahle told those at the October 17 virtual forum. Other services are progressively coming back online—although some are in a read-only mode for now.

The Internet Archive is not alone in being the target of a malicious cyberattack: The British Library and Calgary Public Library have also been victims, said Chris Freeland, moderator of the forum and director of library services.

“This is a critical moment for libraries, including our own. As a library system, together, we are facing unprecedented challenges with book bans, defunding, and now cyberattacks,” Freeland said.

Still, the Internet Archive staff and community partners remain focused on digital preservation and providing access to needed materials that serve the public interest.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

Even before the technical disruption last week, Elizabeth MacLeod said the digitization teams have a contingency plan in place so scanners can work offline until systems are operational again. MacLeod manages the Internet Archive’s seven regional scanning centers and digital operations in many partner libraries.

Mek Karpeles said the Internet Archive’s Open Library, a community catalog of book metadata run by staff and volunteers, thrives by being public and open.

“Because of this whole ecosystem, Open Library’s core services have been able to continue to run,” in the aftermath of the cyberattack, Mek said. “The data is all safe, and we’re taking this opportunity to prioritize security and ensure reader privacy for our patrons.”

The cyberattack was humbling, said Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and underscored the essential service the team provides.

The Wayback Machine adds more than 1 billion URLs a day, including every URL added to every Wikipedia article across 320 languages, and URLs shared on X, and Reddit. It has rescued more than 22 million broken links in 467 Wikis.

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

“We are weaving ourselves and being woven more integrally into the web itself—becoming part of the essential infrastructure for the web experience,” Graham said. “We’re helping to preserve the history of the web but make it relevant and accessible to people today and into the future.”

Focusing on at-risk information, Internet Archive works to preserve television news from 30 channels around the world, using artificial intelligence to perform transcription and translation.

“Making the web more useful and reliable is what we live for,” Graham said. “Team Wayback Machine and other projects at the Internet Archive are focused on doing more and doing better.”

The forum included an update on litigation involving the Internet Archive. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the ruling in a lawsuit filed by four large publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House), explained Peter Routhier, policy counsel for the Internet Archive. To date, the Internet Archive has removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org as a result of the lawsuit. On another front, some of the world’s largest record labels are suing the Great 78 Project, a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records.

The Archive posted an open letter to publishers in the lawsuit to restore access to the books that have been removed from the digital library. To date, more than 120,000 people have signed, adding heartfelt messages about what the impact of the loss has meant.

“We own these books,” Freeland said. “We just want to let readers read.”

WATCH THE SESSION RECORDING

To build public awareness and support on these issues, Jennie Rose Halperin is developing a coalition to lobby the U.S. Congress for a commemorative National Public Domain Day. She invited interested parties to join in the effort through Library Futures, the organization where she serves as executive director.

Halperin is also active in pushing for a statement of principles on library ownership of digital books.

Some independent publishers are selling ebooks directly to libraries through BRIET, a new project of the Brick House Cooperative, David Moore, a writer and technologist, said at the forum.

Halperin is working alongside Charlie Barlow, executive director of the Boston Library Consortium, on Project ReShare to develop an open, standards-based, community-owned set of tools for digital lending.

Barlow has long been an advocate of controlled digital lending through BLC, and just released a report outlining CDL workflows and technologies for responsible sharing, he said at the forum. He also is working on a new consortium toolkit for CDL implementation. The report and resources can be downloaded at www.blc.org/cdl.

Also at this year’s LLF, Dave Hansen, executive director of Authors Alliance, encouraged authors to review the organization’s free legal resource guides on copyright and fair use so they see their work more widely disseminated.

Posted on September 21, 2024 by Brewster Kahle

On Sept 4, 2024, the US Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the lower court ruling in the lawsuit filed against us by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. While the Internet Archive is disappointed by this opinion—it was never the Internet Archive’s intention to get into a lawsuit over lending digitized books—we respect the outcome.

To date, we have removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org (and therefore also openlibrary.org). While we are reviewing all available options, this judicial opinion will lead to the removal of many more books from lending. It is important for the Internet Archive and all libraries to continue to have a healthy relationship with publishers and authors.

Please be assured that millions of digitized books will still be available to those with print disabilities, small sections will be available for those linking into them from Wikipedia and through interlibrary loan, books will continue to be preserved for the long term, and other protected library uses will continue to inform digital learners everywhere.

The Internet Archive is also increasing its investment in digital books from publishers willing to sell ebooks that libraries can own and lend. While this is currently from a small number of publishers, the number is growing and we see it as a future for the long term sustainability of authors, publishers, and libraries. Encouragingly, the Independent Publishers Group recently endorsed selling ebooks to libraries. The growing number of libraries purchasing and owning digital books brings fair compensation to authors and publishers, along with permanent preservation and access to author’s works for communities everywhere.

We respect the opinion of the courts and, while we are saddened by how this setback affects our patrons and the future of all libraries, the Internet Archive remains strong and committed to our mission of Universal Access to All Knowledge. Thank you for your help and support.

Posted on September 9, 2024 by Caralee Adams

The following interview with African folklore scholars Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde is part of ourVanishing Cultureseries, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Crafting and sharing folktales by word or performance is a long-standing tradition on the African continent. No one owned the stories. They were community treasures passed down through the generations.

Over time, many disappeared. The few stories that were written down enjoyed a broader audience once published. As those books were harder to find or out of print, digitized versions kept some folktales alive.

Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde are among researchers of African folktales who rely on digital collections to do their work. They maintain that digital preservation is essential for these rare cultural artifacts to remain accessible to the public.

Much of the transmission of African stories through performance has been lost. “That’s a culture that has either completely vanished or is vanishing,” said Nde, who immigrated from Cameroon to the United States.

In her forthcoming book on African folklore by Watkins Publishing (March 2025), Nde said 70% of her references were from sources she found through the Internet Archive. The Atlanta-based folklorist uses material either in the public domain or available through controlled digital lending (CDL) for her research. She also turns to the online collection to inform writing for her educational platform, Mythological Africans.

Many books produced on the African continent by smaller publishing houses are now out of print or very expensive. Nde said without access to a library that carries these folktales, they can be forgotten.

“What’s tragic is that quite often those books that are so hard to get are the books that are written by people from within the culture, or African scholars,” Nde said. “They speak the languages and in some cases, remember the traditional ways the stories are told. They understand the stories in ways that people from outside the cultures cannot.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these [African folklore] texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

Helen Nde, author

These authors can fill in gaps from researchers with a different perspective than those who documented the stories from outside, she said, adding that’s why digital preservation is so important. While many African folklore texts are in the public domain in the United States, much of the anthropological and historical texts with commentary from both African and non-African scholars that provide the necessary context for these folktales are not, Nde said. “In many instances, these important auxiliary texts are out of print, which means access via the Internet Archive is the best way scholars not located in the West might ever be able to access them,” Nde said. “I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

For Gibbs, online access to digitized books is critical to the volunteer work she does since retiring from teaching mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma. She compiled A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive, a curated bibliography of hundreds of folktale books that she has shared with the public through the Internet Archive.

“For me doing my work, the Internet Archive is my library,” said Gibbs, who lives in Austin, Texas. “There are books at the Internet Archive that I can’t get at my local library or even in my local university library. Some of these books are really obscure. There just physically aren’t that many copies out there.”

Being able to check out one digital title at a time through controlled digital lending opened up new possibilities. In her research, she can use the search function with the title of a book, name of an illustrator or some other kind of detail. Now in her digital research, she can use the search function to perform work that she couldn’t do with physical books, such as keyword searches, with speed and precision. The collection also has been helpful in her recent project at Wikipedia to fill in information on African oral literature, such as proverbs and folktales.

“Digital preservation is not only preservation, it’s also transformation. Because when things have been digitized, you can share them in different ways, explore them in different ways, connect them in different ways,” Gibbs said. “So, I connect different versions of the stories to one another, and then I can help readers connect to all those different versions of the stories. But now, because of the publishers’ lawsuit, many important African folktale collections and reference works are no longer available for borrowing at the Archive.”

What would it mean to lose digital access to these folktales? “It would be the end of my work,” said Gibbs. “My whole goal is to make the African folktales at the Archive more accessible to readers around the world by providing bibliographies, indexes, and summaries of the stories. But now the publishers are shutting down that public access.”

“The stories were embodied in the traditional storytellers and in their communities, and the continuity of that tradition over time has been so disrupted,” Gibbs said. “The loss is just staggering. The stories that were recorded are just a tiny fraction of the thousands of stories in the hundreds of different African languages…We can’t afford to let this kind of loss happen again in the digital world.”

Gibbs adds that just as museums are repatriating artifacts from colonized countries, the original stories of African countries need to be made available to their communities. “Digital libraries like the Internet Archive are a crucial way to make these stories available to African readers.”

Preservation of African folklore is not just important for research purposes, but also for self-exploration and reflection. When examining African folklore, Nde often asks: “What can these stories tell me about myself?” she said. “Speaking from my own experience, African folktales are an underexplored resource for understanding the cultural history of African peoples,” Nde said. “Mythology and folklore are how people make sense of themselves as people on this planet.”

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Chris Freeland

We want to hear from you: How does the appellate court’s decision affect your reading or research? What does it mean to you that 500,000+ books are no longer available in our lending library?

Please share your story: https://forms.gle/JgwWLxhvKgAZdV9T7

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Chris Freeland

We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.

Take Action
Sign the open letter to publishers, asking them to restore access to the 500,000 books removed from our library: https://change.org/LetReadersRead

You can read the opinion here.

Editorial note: updated 9/5/24 to include link to appellate opinion.

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Chris Freeland

The publishers’ lawsuit against our library is featured in the latest episode of “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast.

Listen in as Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s digital librarian, talks with Chris Hayes about the future of libraries, and what the publishers’ lawsuit means for libraries & their patrons in the digital age. Chris & Brewster are joined by librarian and lawyer, Kyle K. Courtney.

Streaming now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, & TuneIn.

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Chris Freeland

Last Friday, the Internet Archive was in court, fighting for the digital rights of libraries. Our appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, was heard in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Here are some resources to help you understand what happened in court:

🔊 Listen to the oral argument. The full 90+ minute proceedings are available to listen to online.

🗞️ Read the analysis of the oral argument from Authors Alliance. Executive Director Dave Hansen offered a rapid analysis of the oral argument in a thorough Substack post.

📚 Read coverage of the post-argument discussion at the American Library Association Annual Conference. Following oral argument, the legal team representing the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive, remotely joined the eBook Interest Group discussion during ALA’s Annual Conference in San Diego. The conversation offered Brewster and the legal team a chance to explain what happened in the courtroom, and to answer questions from librarians and members of the press who gathered for the session. Ars Technica covered the discussion in an excellent post, “Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers.”

Take action

lawsuit | Internet Archive Blogs (9)

Tell the publishers: Let Readers Read! We have an open letter to the publishers, asking them to restore access to the 500,000+ books they’ve removed from our lending library as a result of their lawsuit. Sign the open letter today!

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Chris Freeland

Editorial note: The following message came into our patron services team this week. We are posting here in full with the patron’s permission as it explains the full scope of the challenges our readers are facing following the publishers’ decision to remove more than 500,000 books from our lending library.

Here is Maureen, in her own words:

“I use the Internet Archive for many reasons and the book removals have impacted my ability to do so! Despite my good fortune to live in a community which provides a great library with plenty of physical books and a decent digital selection via Libby, the Archive still meets needs which my local library cannot fulfill.

I’m disabled: it causes fatigue, executive dysfunction, and more. I also am at high risk for Long Covid complications, so I try to limit my time in crowded public areas.

Additionally I live in an area with extreme weather that runs the gamut from whiteout blizzards, river floods making roads impassable, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and on and on!

This means that actually GETTING to the library can be a challenge at times, especially as I work, which further reduces the hours available.

While I do have a decent selection of typical contemporary ebooks via my community library’s Libby app, many topics of importance to me aren’t represented well or at all.

These include:

* LGBT, feminist, and disability studies books (many of which are long out of print, had small print runs or cost exorbitant academic prices, and were published long before ebooks existed or only in other areas of the world).

* retro/vintage/historical children’s picture books as well as vintage scifi and fantasy books, for many of the reasons listed above.

* Niche topics in anthropology, archaeology, and world religions. (Again for the aforementioned reasons).

It also really infuriates me that the lawsuit claims that use of the Archive’s library is just “recreational”.

* Just because I’m no longer in college or grad school doesn’t mean I’ve stopped learning, or privately researching, or somehow lost my desire for knowledge!

* (Plus, full-time and part-time independent scholars EXIST OUTSIDE OF THE ACADEMY and it’s so disheartening to see their contributions ignored/denied.)

* All children’s books are BY DEFINITION educational! They’re teaching kids to read!!!!!

* So are all nonfiction & biography books! They convey important information that help people make sense of the world.

* Vintage/retro genre books (romance, mystery, scifi etc) are in fact subjects of scholarship, through Fandom Studies, Leisure Studies, History, Literature etc. The Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University is a perfect example!

* And yes, contemporary genre books are subjects of scholarship too. And while many non-academics read vintage and/or contemporary genre books for solely for fun, many of us also like to chart changes in genre over time.

* For example, I am a Trekkie (Star Trek fan) and comparing very early Trek novels with recent ones is illuminating on a fandom history level AND a sociological level.

***Education and scholarship also mean private self-study. Publishers need to stop locking knowledge in the academic ivory tower!!!!!!!!***

In short- the Internet Archive is very important to me and millions of other readers. The books need to be restored to circulation. Let us read, let us learn.”

Maureen L., Iowa City, Iowa

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Chris Freeland

Friday is our day in court. After four long years of legal action, we will be in New York for the appellate oral argument in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library.

Show Your Support!

Throughout this four-year process, our patrons and supporters have asked how to help in this fight. Here are actions you can take to stand with the Internet Archive:

1. Watch the oral argument on Friday, June 28.
The proceedings will be livestreamed starting at 10am ET. Join via https://ww2.ca2.uscourts.gov/court.html,Courtroom 1505.

2. Tell the publishers: Let readers read!
We’ve created an open letter to the publishers, asking them to restore access to the 500,000 books they’ve removed from our library. Add your signature today!

3. Stay connected.
Sign up for theEmpowering Libraries newsletterfor ongoing updates about the lawsuit and our library.

A quick recap

After the lower court sided with the publishers last March, we committed to appeal the decision. The appeal process kicked off last fall, with our opening brief filed in December, followed by amicus briefs in support of our library and library lending two weeks later. On Friday, we’ll appear in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, continuing our fight for library digital rights.

What’s at stake?

The lawsuit is about the longstanding and widespread library practice of controlled digital lending, which is how we lend the books we own to our patrons. As a result of the publishers’ lawsuit, more than 500,000 books have been removed from our lending library. The impacts on our patrons have been devastating:

Posted on June 20, 2024 by Brewster Kahle

Editorial note: This op-ed first ran in Time Magazine in 2021. We are reposting it here with permission as we head into oral argument for our appeal in the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, scheduled for next Friday, June 28, 2024.

When I started the Internet Archive 25 years ago, I focused our non-profit library on digital collections: preserving web pages, archiving television news, and digitizing books. The Internet Archive was seen as innovative and unusual. Now all libraries are increasingly electronic, and necessarily so. To fight disinformation, to serve readers during the pandemic, and to be relevant to 21st-century learners, libraries must become digital.

But just as the Web increased people’s access to information exponentially, an opposite trend has evolved. Global media corporations—emboldened by the expansive copyright laws they helped craft and the emerging technology that reaches right into our reading devices—are exerting absolute control over digital information. These two conflicting forces—towards unfettered availability and completely walled access to information—have defined the last 25 years of the Internet. How we handle this ongoing clash will define our civic discourse in the next 25 years. If we fail to forge the right path, publishers’ business models could eliminate one of the great tools for democratizing society: our independent libraries.

These are not small mom-and-pop publishers: a handful of publishers dominate all books sales and distribution including trade books, ebooks, and text books. Right now, these corporate publishers are squeezing libraries in ways that may render it impossible for any library to own digital texts in five years, let alone 25. Soon, librarians will be reduced to customer service reps for a Netflix-like rental catalog of bestsellers. If that comes to pass, you might as well replace your library card with a credit card. That’s what these billion-dollar-publishers are pushing.

The libraries I grew up with would buy books, preserve them, and lend them for free to their patrons. If my library did not have a particular book, then it would borrow a copy from another library for me. In the shift from print to digital, many commercial publishers are declaring each of these activities illegal: they refuse libraries the right to buy ebooks, preserve ebooks, or lend ebooks. They demand that libraries license ebooks for a limited time or for limited uses at exorbitant prices, and some publishers refuse to license audiobooks or ebooks to libraries at all, making those digital works unavailable to hundreds of millions of library patrons.

Although we’re best known for theWayback Machine, a historical archive of the World Wide Web, the Internet Archive also buys ebooks from the few independent publishers that will sell,really sell, ebooks to us. With these ebooks, we lend them to one reader at a time, protected with the same technologies that publishers use to protect their ebooks. The Internet Archive also digitizes print books that were purchased or donated. Similarly, we lend them to one reader at a time, following a practice employed by hundreds of libraries over the last decade called “controlled digital lending.”

Last year,* four of the biggest commercial publishers in the worldsued the Internet Archiveto stop this longstanding library practice of controlled lending of scanned books. Thepublishers filed their lawsuitearly in the pandemic, when public and school libraries were closed. In March 2020, more than one hundred shuttered libraries signed a statement of support asking that the Internet Archive do something to meet the extraordinary circumstances of the moment. We responded as any library would: making our digitized books available, without waitlists, to help teachers, parents, and students stranded without books. This emergency measure ended two weeks before the intended 14-week period.

Thelawsuit demandsthat the Internet Archive destroy 1.4 million digitized books, books we legally acquired and scanned in cooperation with dozens of library partners. If the publishers win this lawsuit, then every instance of online reading would require the permission and license of a publisher. It would give publishers unprecedented control over what we can read and when, as well as troves of data about our reading habits.

Publishers’ bullying tactics have stirred lawmakers in Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island to draft laws requiring that publishers treat libraries fairly. Maryland’s legislature passed the law unanimously. In those states, if an ebook is licensed to consumers, publishers will be required by law to license it to libraries on reasonable terms. But lobbyists for the publishing industry claim even these laws are unconstitutional. This is a dangerous state of affairs. Libraries should be free to buy, preserve, and lend all books regardless of the format.

Suing libraries is not a new tactic for these billion-dollar corporations and their surrogates: Georgia State University’s law library battled a copyright lawsuit for 12 years;HathiTrust Digital Librarybattled the Author’s Guild for five years. In each case, the library organization won, but it took millions of dollars that libraries can ill-afford.

Libraries spend billions of dollars on publishers’ products, supporting authors, illustrators, and designers. If libraries become mere customer service departments for publisher’s pre-packaged product lines, the role that librarians play in highlighting marginalized voices, providing information to the disadvantaged, and preserving cultural memory independent of those in power will be lost.

As we shift from print to digital, we can and must support institutions and practices that were refined over hundreds of years starting with selling ebooks to readers and libraries.

So if we all handle this next phase of the Internet well, I believe the answer is, yes, there will be libraries in 25 years, many libraries—and many publishers, many booksellers, millions of compensated authors, and a society in which everyone will read good books.

*Editorial note: This op-ed was first published in 2021.

lawsuit | Internet Archive Blogs (2024)

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