As blog readers will know, we often use the services of the Internet Archive to preserve recordings of Regents meetings and for other purposes. Many people use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to locate web sources that no longer currently exist. The Internet Archive was threatened by two lawsuits dealing with its library lending practices of books and its preservation of 78 rpm recordings.*
We now have assurance from the Archive that it has survived settlements of the two lawsuits. From Ars Technica:
Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”
The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”
“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”
An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas...
Full story at https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-archive-survived-major-copyright-losses-whats-next/.
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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/09/one-suit-settled.html.
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