Memory in the age of the utterly now: The precarious state of the Internet Archive

"Information wants to be free" has been the watchword of the so-called free culture movement which has manifested itself in such phenomena as the free and open source software community and as Creative Commons. (For those who don't know, Creative Commons is a way to establish rights and authorship of creative works while also specifying how those works can be distributed and used by others in ways that are far less restrictive than traditional copyright—for instance, by allowing for varying levels of sharing, editing and incorporation in the works of others.)

It is in this tradition that following the sale of his web crawling company to Amazon for $250 million in 1999, Brewster Kahle increasingly devoted himself to his nonprofit startup, the Internet Archive, a project which became his full-time pursuit as of 2002 and remains so today. But today, the future of the Internet Archive is highly uncertain.

It is very likely that almost everyone reading this sentence has used the Internet Archive at some point to retrieve internet pages no longer available, to do research, or to archive internet pages for future reference.

Here's how the Internet Archive describes its activities and holdings:

[W]e have 28+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 1,200+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains:

• 835 billion web pages
• 44 million books and texts
• 15 million audio recordings (including 255,000 live concerts)
• 10.6 million videos (including 2.6 million Television News programs)
• 4.8 million images
• 1 million software programs

It's an impressive collection and its very existence is being threatened by copyright holders who believe their rights have been violated and want substantial compensation. The struggle of those who create and copyright works of art, fiction, music, journalism, software and other forms of expression to control the promiscuous transmission of their work in the electronic age is not new. What is now at stake is whether a site that wishes to preserve electronic forms of those works can do so and whether it can survive lawsuits that not only threaten to prevent it from archiving such works, but also to bankrupt it so that is can no longer even provide access to works not covered by copyright protection.

The argument made by defenders of intellectual property is that without it, creative people would not produce works of art, fiction, music, journalism, software and so on. It is worth noting that copyright is a relatively recent phenomenon by historical standards, only coming into existence in the 1790s.

And, yet creative works have been undertaken by humans from the 30,000-year-old Chauvet Cave paintings in what today is southern France, to the marble statues of ancient Greece and Rome, to the paintings of Renaissance masters, to the works of Shakespeare, all without copyright law. (There were, of course, other methods by which the creators were supported.) And there is today the plethora of free content on the internet including free software, some of very high quality, for which the authors seek no compensation.

I am not saying there should be no copyright, only that the needs of the society which has educated and supported the creative person ought to be taken into account. I copyright my work on my blog. But I have never refused any reasonable request to repost my work when asked, and I have never complained to anyone who did so without permission if they gave me credit.

Having said all this, the Internet Archive and other online archives are in a precarious state for reasons other than copyright. We know of the Chauvet Cave paintings, the statues of Classical antiquity, Renaissance paintings and Shakespeare's works because they were all rendered in physical mediums that were able to survive centuries and even millennia.

Of course, physical records of culture are by no means certain to survive. For example, the destruction of great libraries by war, looting, fire and official policy has a long history. But today all that needs to happen is for someone to pull the plug on our electronic archives either for legal reasons or for more cataclysmic reasons involving looming resource limits and climate change that undermine the stability of modern technical civilization so much that large-scale electronic archiving is no longer possible.

It is important to note that archives are an extension of human memory, and memory is the key to identity. Who we are today is almost entirely related to what we have done and who we've associated with in the past and what our ancestors did before us. To lose one's memory as an individual, is to forget who one is. To lose it on a cultural level is to forget what nation or culture one belongs to.

The loss of the Internet Archive would be only a partial blow to our cultural memory as there will still be many other repositories of memory. But the comprehensive nature of this archive would be hard to reproduce in any form and its loss would vastly complicate trying to find information from the past that originated on the internet, but no longer resides there. For now, whether our civilization suffers a self-inflicted case of memory loss is in the hands of lawyers and judges. Why is it that I'm not feeling optimistic?

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.