As the legacy of the World Wide Web pages lives on the Internet Archive, the site started being threatened by the numerous lawsuits by copyright holders.
If there is a place on the Internet where you have a chance to see what webpages used to look like, the Wayback Machine is where Internet users go to.
The Wayback Machine is an initiative by Internet Archive that serves as a digital archive of the World Wide Web. Launched in 1996 and made public in 2001, the Internet Archive contains images and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) from various webpages.
The stored files are later attached to timestamps that are accessible to Internet users.
Aside from witnessing what webpages looked like in its earlier days, the Internet Archive also serves as a home to 886 billion webpages archives that people could easily explore through clicks.
According to the website, the Internet Archive only has one mission and that is “to give access to all knowledge, forever. For free.”
From websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials, it’s like a one-stop shop for all but digitalized and free.
The Internet Archive can also be a place where the legacy of offline sites can live on, and one recent example of this is the MTV News archives.
MTV News legacy lives on, sort of…
After documenting decades worth of music scene, MTV News bid goodbye by going offline on June 24. Instead of getting redirected when typing the link “MTV.com/news or MTVNews.com,” the site directs users to the main MTV website.
With MTV News ending its era, numerous former MTV News employees and netizens expressed their reaction on X (formerly twitter).
However, many netizens believed that MTV News articles might be available on Internet archive sites such as the Wayback Machine.
Upon looking for MTV News articles archived in the Wayback Machine, the site has assembled a searchable index that leads to the 460,575 articles that were previously published under the link of mtv.com/news.
While the webpages seem to extend to the year of 1997, the MTV News archive on the Wayback Machine does not contain everything that was released throughout the course of more than 20 years.
Furthermore, certain images inside the MTV News archive platform aren’t accessible.
However, a new collection ensures that a large portion of MTV News’ content is still available in some capacity for the time being.
This includes the well-known weekly hip-hop column “Mixtape Mondays” to which the Wayback Machine search yielded 2,919 entries for that query.
Copyright infringement
It is easy to say that the Internet Archive has done more than it can possibly do in terms of preserving digital journalism and contents.
However, when the topic began shifting to the properties of the rightful owners of the content, the whole topic of digital preservation comes to a complicated talk of lawsuits.
In 2006, the latter constructed Open Library, with purchased books being offered as “e-books.”
The system is being controlled as a digital lending method, a type of method that is used in academic institutions and the public to lend books to people who wouldn’t be able to borrow a physical copy due to physical restrictions or location.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive decided to temporarily expand their book lending capabilities—leading to a lawsuit from four major publishing groups with the claim that the organization’s lending process was impacting the publisher’s e-book licensing revenue.
Adding to this was the archive’s breach of the copyright law.
About 500,000 books (many of which are out-of-print or prohibited) were taken out of the Archive’s collection last year because of a lower court decision.
Aside from the legal battle of the Open Library, Sony and music labels made another legal challenge against the archive due to its collection of unauthorized digital vinyls.
The labels demanded a staggering $372 million in damages–an amount that could put the archive’s existence in jeopardy.
Future of digital preservation
The situation that the Internet Archive is currently in means that the digital preservation of contents within the World Wide Web is under threat. Disappearance of digital archives can lead to a spread of misinformation (if not, disinformation) in the future.
About the dispute of the Open Library, the Archive’s opposition against the ruling will be heard on Friday.
Internet Archive CEO Brewster Kahle has characterized this legal dispute as crucial to the survival of democracy and libraries, highlighting the need of safe access to historical documents.
