Have you ever recalled a website you enjoyed 20 years ago, wished you’d saved an article from it, and are cursing loudly because the site has long since gone down so that content is gone forever? Well, if you are lucky, that content might still exist in the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive, if you will forgive me quoting (well, paraphrasing) Wikipedia, is an American non-profit library founded in 1996 that runs a digital library website. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates a free and open Internet, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”
My niece recently brought up the subject of the Internet Archive in a group email among the family, pondering the ethics of the Archive making content, including that with copyright, available for anyone to access and download for free.
I see her point, but having more than once found what might otherwise have been forever-lost content there, I also very much value the important work the Archive does.
My nephew replied with an excellent defense, and in response my niece replied, “I agree that the value of preserving the information and culture outweighs the potential copyright concerns. It makes me very happy to know that music I had thought only existed on no-longer-published cassettes or CDs is still accessible and will hopefully remain so for a long time.”
Below, with his permission, is my nephew’s masterfully-written defense of the Internet Archive (into which I have added many paragraph breaks, but no other edits).
In defense of the Internet Archive
The internet biases strongly against preservation. The concept of “Lost Media” has existed in archaeoanthropology for a very long time, but it’s actually a shockingly uncommon occurrence; most things leave relics, or bits and pieces, or at least imprints in other surrounding media. Even things we think are lost forever often get recovered through new artifacts or techniques, or from the incredible minds of some very dedicated archaeologists.
But with the internet, everything becomes Lost Media. One link goes down, one server stops being maintained, one discord dies, and suddenly 5 years of culture vanish into an aether more impenetrable and irrecoverable than anything nature could construct. And it’s really, truly lost; an ended signal doesn’t leave an imprint in stone or deposited pigments in the sand surrounding the pottery where it was excavated, it’s just gone. Forever.
In giving us the best tool ever for communication and creativity, we have also created the ultimate information annihilator.
This is where the Internet Archive comes in. Archiving is the panacea against Lost Media, and given how fast-paced culture has become and how short attention spans are becoming, I think I’d be within reasonable bands of melodrama to say it’s pretty important for civic growth and democracy as well. Without good archiving, the heinous things someone says and does can be actually erased with the push of a button. When the Nazis went about burning every copy of Farewell to Arms they could find, they obviously weren’t going to erase every single copy; but most media these days don’t have multiple copies. Twitter posts and YouTube videos lack redundancy, and a single DMCA takedown or withdrawal order to a timid or corruptible corporate custodian results in that media disappearing for everyone forever.
Enter the Internet Archive and similar projects, remedying this by undertaking the admittedly Sisyphean task of preserving all that culture so it doesn’t only ever have one copy to endure the fickle hands of a callous social landscape.
But you presented an ethical concern. The ultimate issue is piracy: The Internet Archive is definitely stealing intellectual property, and is participating in undermining revenue streams by making its content freely available to the masses. Because their mission is so antithetical to the values of the internet writ large (which is something of a Westward Expansion, right down to the slash-and-burn frontier methodology), archival projects don’t have a good way to interface with the internet’s various monetization methods, so they can’t compensate the people whose work they are stealing.
Having identified the ethical concern, we now have the ethical question: Is the cost of transgression by stealing intellectual property worth the benefit of saving media from the most powerful and thorough tool of cultural annihilation ever?
Ethics is ultimately the field of study around our hierarchies of values. One of the most famous examples: We all know that killing is bad, but are there circumstances where the refusal to kill leads to worse outcomes? That’s the basic premise of the Trolley Problem, one of the most famous and straightforward thought experiments in ethics. Pivoting back to the internet archive, the concerns are piracy—theft of intellectual property—and protecting against the degradation into Lost Media. For me, personally, I put the prevention of the annihilation of culture much higher on my hierarchy of values than concerns about piracy. But then I’m pretty ambivalent about the ethics of owning ideas and property, but that’s a very different conversation.
We could argue about the importance of finding a stable and less frictive method of archiving. A centralized authority preserving the internet as a Special Collection with paid access, who in turn distributes some funds to the creators whose work you access, for example; but anything of that magnitude and complexity would take years of work and political will you won’t find anywhere.
So in the meantime I think we should celebrate the work the Internet Archive does and not worry too much about the “stealing” it’s doing. Especially since AI companies are doing all the same shit and basically getting away with it.