Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but It Will Erase the Web's History
15 hours ago
- #Digital Preservation
- #Internet Archive
- #Fair Use
- The Internet Archive, the world's largest digital library, has preserved newspapers and web pages since the mid-1990s.
- The New York Times and other newspapers are blocking the Archive from crawling their sites, risking the loss of historical records.
- Publishers are concerned about AI companies scraping content, leading to lawsuits over copyright and fair use.
- Blocking nonprofit archivists like the Internet Archive could erase decades of historical documentation.
- Courts have recognized making material searchable as fair use, similar to Google's book scanning project.
- The Archive preserves the web's history, with Wikipedia linking to over 2.6 million archived news articles.
- Future researchers may lose access to vast portions of the historical record if publishers continue blocking the Archive.