Does a court ruling mean no more Internet Archive, Way Back Machine?

11 September 2024

The Internet Archive (IA) has been fighting a number of legal proceedings recently, after making digitised copies of numerous books and novels freely available, through their website. At no point did the IA seek permission from any of the authors involved, nor did they offer them any sort of payment, for copying and distributing their work.

Last week the United States Court of Appeals ruled against the IA, who were seeking to overturn a lawsuit brought against them by a number of publishing houses. The outcome may force the not-for-profit organisation to shut down.

The IA is perhaps best known for the Way Back Machine, a repository of past and present websites. According to the IA, they have archived over eight-hundred-and-sixty billion webpages, including copies of disassociated since 1998.

But websites and books are not all that the IA has taken copies of. TV shows, software applications, and images, are also among their vast collections of digital paraphernalia, much of which is also subject to copyright, as Bryan Lunduke writes:

First and foremost: Has the Internet Archive made, and distributed, digital copies of work you own? This ruling will certainly not hurt your case should you decide to take legal action against Archive.org. And — holy smokes — the amount of copyrighted material on Archive.org is absolutely massive.

Although past versions of my website archived by the IA may constitute them distributing digital copies of my work, I’ve never viewed that negatively. In fact, I’ve always found it useful to have access to earlier instances of disassociated, especially as I didn’t backup all of my old website designs. In my case though, I don’t see the IA’s duplicates of my work as any sort of copyright violation. Rather, I think of these copies as something of a “mirror” of disassociated.

Whether people look up my website via the URL, or the Way Back Machine, doesn’t particularly matter. The content is the same. It hasn’t been altered in any way I’m aware of. Further, as far as I know, the IA isn’t charging anyone to see the archived versions of disassociated, and therefore making money by way of my efforts.

But the Way Back Machine isn’t just there for me to go looking up old versions of my website. It’s also akin to a museum of the internet. A place where we can go and see websites that have long since gone offline, and study the history of the web. To this end, in my opinion, the Way Back Machine serves an important purpose.

The IA’s duplication of novels, and distribution through a “library”, is a different matter entirely. Although some well-known novels are now in the public domain, those published in recent decades usually are not. Copyright laws prevent novels from being duplicated and distributed by unauthorised means. And that’s the way it should be. Consider that many Australian authors earn less than thirty-thousand (Australian) dollars a year. Poets usually make well below ten-thousand dollars. Both these figures are far less than the minimum wage in Australia.

Depriving writers of income by freely copying and distributing their work is plain wrong. I’m really at a loss to understand why the IA pushed ahead with such a program. Equally, I find it hard to believe they thought they were doing the right thing. But what’s truly unfortunate is how the judicial findings against the IA could bring about their end, and that of the Way Back Machine.