in the latest cyber-news: the internet archive has lost their case against 4 major publishing houses (verge article). they’re going to appeal, but this is still a bad outcome. the fate of the internet is currently hanging in the balance because 4 multibillionare publishing groups missed out on like $15 of combined revenue during the pandemic because of the archive’s online library service. it’s so fucking stupid.
for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.
so how can you help?
boycott the publishing companies involved in this. they’re absolute ghouls, frankly, and don’t deserve a penny. the companies involved are harpercollins (imprints), wiley (imprints), penguin random house llc (imprints), and hachette book group (imprints). make sure the websites are set to your location as it may differ worldwide.
learn to torrent. download a torrent client (i recommend transmission), a vpn (i recommend protonvpn - sign up and choose the area that’s closest to your continent/country), and hit up /r/piracy on reddit for websites. with torrenting, you can get (almost) any media you want for free in high quality, with add-ons such as subtitles, and with no risks of loss. i would also recommend getting into the habit of watching stuff online for free. the less you can pay to a giant corporation, the better.
get into the habit of downloading and archiving materials. find a TB external hard drive, ideally the higher the better. it’ll probably cost around $60 for 1TB and continue to go up, but they’re so so useful. if you can’t afford a drive, look for any GB harddrives or memory sticks you have lying around and just fill them up. videos, pdfs, magazines, songs, movies, games - anything you can rip and download and fit on there, do it, because nothing is permanent.
donate to the internet archive. this is the most important option on the list. the IA relies entirely on funding, and it’s going to need more to fight this case. whatever you can donate, do it. i promise it’s helpful.
and finally…
cannot stress enough that donating to the internet archive to help them appeal this without going broke is the most important thing you can do right now. my day job revolves around fulfilling digital article and book scan requests at an academic library and a huge part of that is borrowing from other libraries that do controlled digital lending (incl. the internet archive!). copyright law is already hugely restrictive on what we can and can't lend, and we absolutely don't have the option to pirate anything for our patrons due to being a large academic institution. it's difficult to overstate just how bad this ruling could end up being for libraries that have digital lending programs, esp ones that rely on CDR for old/archival/hard-to-find texts.
