The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive Copyright Commerce and Culture Fall 2009

Internet Library
Nonprofit
organization based
out of San Francisco
Founded in 1996
Brewster Kahle
“Exercising our right to remember”

Internet Library
“ Libraries exist to preserve society's cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it's essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.”
-The Internet Archive
“ It's a fallacy that if something is on the web, it will stay there…It’s not like a piece of paper you put in a file folder and it will be there forever. There’s an urgent need for people to understand that the web is who we are. It's our culture and our social fabric, and we don't want to lose any of it.” -Kristine Hanna, director of web archiving services for the Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle
Graduated from MIT
Designed supercomputers at
Thinking Machines Corp.
Founded WAIS ( Wide Area
Information Servers )
first system for publishing
quantities of data in a searchable
form on the Internet
Clients included: New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, Encyclopedia Britannica
Sold WAIS to America Online for $15 million in 1995
Alexa Internet
a for-profit search engine, which tracks and provides data for online traffic
Bought by Amazon
Kahle used the funds from the sale of WAIS to originally finance the nonprofit Internet Archive

Internet Archive Holdings
Text Archive: 1,793,279 items
Moving Image Gallery: 231,260 items
Audio Archive:443,252 items
Live Music Archive: 71,267 concerts, 3,870 bands
Software: 33,364 items
Wayback Machine: 150 billion webpages

The Wayback Machine
Virtual Time Capsule
Goes back to 1996
Operates by crawling the internet and systematically and routinely capturing webpages

Google Revisited 1998

Google Revisited Then and Now 1998 and 2009

Facebook Revisited 2004

Facebook Revisited Then and Now 2004 and 2009

Expansion Efforts
Archive-It
Subscription based service
Sun Microsystems
Storing massive amounts of data
Ensuring data will be preserved
Multiple copies around the world
reCaptchas
Professor Luis Von Ahn
Completely Automated Public
Turing test to tell Computers
and Humans Apart
NASA Images

Battleground
Claims of Copyright Infringement in regards to the Wayback Machine
Classification as a Library rather than a search engine

Copyright Restrictions
“ The archive’s omnivorous hoarding puts it on ‘incredibly treacherous legal ground…the archive is a public service that is doing a public good...we want to have a historical record of what happened on the Web. Unfortunately, it is directly at odds with US copyright law, and copyright law in most countries’ since the archive collects and stores copyrighted images and texts without obtaining explicit permission from their owners.”
-John Palfrey, executive director Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard

Healthcare Advocates
Case Filed in 2005
Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey used material obtained with the Wayback Machine in a previous case against Healthcare Advocates
Healthcare Advocates claimed
Copyright infringement by the Internet Archive
Robots.txt opt-out vs. opt-in model
DRM circumvention by Harding Earley
Case settled out of court in 2006

Relevant Court Cases
How might the Healthcare Advocates case have been decided?
Kelly v. Arriba, Perfect 10 inc. v. Google
Dealt with search engines copying material without permission
Ruled Fair Use
Google v. Field
Dealt with caching of webpages
Ruled Fair Use
Key difference between the Internet Archive and a search engine: “storing and distributing the contents of other sites is only incidental to search engines’ activities, while it is archives’ primary activity.” –Kinari Patel

Libraries—Physical vs. Digital
Copyright Act of 1998
Exempted libraries from copyright infringement
Limited the term “library” to institutions operating out of a physical premise
The American Memory Project
Goal: a universal digital library of all
Library of Congress Holdings
Achieved: Digitized 10% of holdings
Kahle’s estimated cost for full
digitization: $260 Million
The Internet Archive: 3 petabytes of information, equivalent to 150 times the information in the Library of Congress
The Internet Archive was officially recognized as a library by the State of California in June 2007

Libraries—Physical vs. Digital
NSL (National Security Letter) served to the Internet Archive by the FBI
NSL requested information about an archive user, and mandated silence from Kahle and the Internet Archive
Patriot Act protects libraries from responding to NSLs
Kahle fought back
Sued FBI represented by EFF and ACLU
Claimed gag order violated constitution
Claimed library status
Acting in tradition of librarians protecting the rights of their patrons
FBI withdrew NSL
Only the 3 rd time ever
Kahle recognized with the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kahle v. Ashcroft
Kahle and the Internet Archive partnered with Prelinger Archives to challenge the constitutionality of four copyright laws
Copyright Act of 1976
Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988
Copyright Renewal Act of 1992
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998
The suit alleged that
creating ever-longer terms for copyright
+
Eliminating registration requirement
=
Congress fundamentally altering the copyright system
The archives hoped to gain access to orphan works, old films, out of print books, etc.
Judge dismissed the case without hearing arguments, basing decision around 1993 Eldred v. Ashcroft

Copyright as an obstacle
“ As several high-profile disputes involving Google, the Internet Archive, and other digital libraries have illustrated, the potential of digital technology to archive and ensure easy access to all the world’s knowledge is being artificially impeded by overbroad statutory and judicial restraints on the Internet-enabled distribution of once-copyrighted material. The current regime for copyright protection of written and recorded works threatens to greatly impede the building of universal digital libraries.”
-Hannibal Travis, Pepperdine Law Review October 2008

The Internet Archive

by guest620f31 on Dec 07, 2009

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The Internet Archive — Presentation Transcript