Since late 2009, the headquarters of the Internet Archive has been the building that formerly housed theFourth Church of Christ, Scientist in San Francisco, California.
The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by itsweb crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Itsweb archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures.[7][8] The Archive also oversees numerousbook digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts.
Headquarters in Building 116 of the Presidio of San Francisco in 2008
Brewster Kahle founded the Archive in May 1996, around the same time that he began the for-profitweb crawling companyAlexa Internet.[9][10] The earliest known archived page on the site, the download page forInternet Explorer, was saved on May 10, 1996, at 14:42UTC (7:42 amPDT).[11][better source needed] By October of that year, the Internet Archive had begun to archive and preserve theWorld Wide Web in large amounts.[12] The archived content became more easily available to the general public in 2001, through theWayback Machine.
In late 1999, the Archive expanded its collections beyond the web archive, beginning with thePrelinger Archives. Now, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, andsoftware. It hosts a number of other projects: theNASA Images Archive, the contract crawling service Archive-It, and the wiki-editable library catalog and book information siteOpen Library. Soon after that, the Archive began working to provide specialized services relating to theinformation access needs of the print-disabled; publicly accessible books were made available in a protectedDigital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format.[13]
Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.
In August 2012, the Archive announced[15] that it had addedBitTorrent to its file download options for more than 1.3 million existing files, and all newly uploaded files.[16][17] This method is the fastest means of downloading media from the Archive, as files are served from two Archive data centers, in addition to other torrent clients which have downloaded and continue to serve the files.[16][18]
On November 6, 2013, the Internet Archive's headquarters inSan Francisco's Richmond District caught fire,[19] destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments.[20] According to the Archive, it lost a side-building housing one of 30 of its scanning centers; cameras, lights, and scanning equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; and "maybe 20 boxes of books and film, some irreplaceable, most already digitized, and some replaceable".[21] The nonprofit Archive sought donations to cover the estimated $600,000 in damage.[22]
An overhaul of the site was launched as beta in November 2014, and the legacy layout was removed in March 2016.[23][24]
In November 2016, Kahle announced that the Internet Archive was building the Internet Archive of Canada, a copy of the Archive to be based somewhere inCanada. The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build a backup archive in a foreign country was because of the upcomingpresidency of Donald Trump.[25][26][27]
Beginning in 2017,OCLC and the Internet Archive have collaborated to make the Archive's records of digitized books available inWorldCat.[28]
Since 2018, the Internet Archive visual arts residency, which is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani and Andrew McClintock, helps connect artists with the Archive's over 48petabytes[29] of digitized materials. Over the course of the yearlong residency, visual artists create a body of work which culminates in an exhibition. The hope is to connect digital history with the arts and create something for future generations to appreciate online or off.[30] Previous artists in residence includeTaravat Talepasand,Whitney Lynn, andJenny Odell.[31]
The Internet Archive acquires most materials from donations,[32] such as hundreds of thousands of 78 rpm discs fromBoston Public Library in 2017,[33] a donation of 250,000 books fromTrent University in 2018,[34] and the entire collection ofMarygrove College's library after it closed in 2020.[35] All material is then digitized and retained in digital storage, while a digital copy is returned to the original holder and the Internet Archive's copy, if not in the public domain, is lent to patrons worldwide one at a time under thecontrolled digital lending (CDL) theory of thefirst-sale doctrine.[36]
In September 2024,Google and the Internet Archive announced a collaboration where links to the wayback machine would be included in the 'more about this page' menu inGoogle Search. This collaboration effectively replaced Google's ownGoogle Cache service that it had retired earlier that year.[40] In September 2024, Google and the Internet Archive announced a collaboration providing links to the Wayback Machine from withinGoogle Search.[41]
During the week of May 27, 2024, the Internet Archive suffered a series ofdistributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that made its services unavailable intermittently, sometimes for hours at a time, over a period of several days.[42][43][44] The attack was claimed on May 28 by a hacker group called SN_BLACKMETA,[45][46] with possible links toAnonymous Sudan.[47] The incident drew a comparison with the 2023British Library cyberattack, which affected theUK Web Archive.[48]
Internet Archive main page showing partially available services
Beginning October 9, 2024, the Internet Archive's team, including archivistJason Scott and security researcher Scott Helme, confirmed DDoS attacks, site defacement, and a data breach. The purportedhacktivist group SN_BLACKMETA again claimed responsibility.[49] A pop-up on the defaced site claimed that there was a "catastrophic"security breach, stating "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you onHIBP!"[50][46] It was reported that about 31 million user accounts were affected, and compromised in a file called "ia_users.sql", dated September 28, 2024.[49][51] The attackers stole users' email addresses andBcrypt-hashed passwords.[52] As of October 15, 2024, the website was still mostly offline for "prioritizing keeping data safe at the expense of service availability."[53] On October 11, Kahle said that the data is safe, and will bring the service back to normal "in days, not weeks."[54][55][56] On October 13, the Wayback Machine was restored in a read-only format, while archiving web pages was temporarily disabled.[57] On October 14, Brewster Kahle said "[the Wayback Machine] volume is back to normal: 1,500 requests per second".[58] On October 20, threat actors stole unrotated API tokens and breached Internet Archive on itsZendesk email support platform; they also claimed responsibility for the other breaches yet stated that SN_BLACKMETA was behind just the DDoS attacks.[59][60] Having been told that threat actors (behind other breaches than SN_BLACKMETA's DDoS attacks) leaked some stolen data to others in the data-trafficking community,Bleeping Computer posited that said threat actors breached the "well-known and extremely popular" Internet Archive not to extort money but to "gain cyber street cred," thus "increasing their reputation."[59][60] On October 21, Internet Archive went back online in a read-only manner.[61] On October 22, all Internet Archive services temporarily went offline,[62][63] but later that same day, only the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, and blog.archive.org were resumed.[citation needed] On October 23, archive.org, the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, and the Open Library services all resumed but with some features, such as logging in, still unavailable until the staff announced it back available in the next day or two.[64] On October 25, the login feature was made available and the site has remained active since.[citation needed]
The Archive is a501(c)(3) nonprofit operating in the United States. In 2019, it had an annual budget of $37 million, derived from revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and theKahle-Austin Foundation.[65] The Internet Archive also manages periodic funding campaigns. For instance, a December 2019 campaign had a goal of reaching $6 million in donations.[66] It usesUbuntu as its choice ofoperating system for the website servers.[67]
Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive talks about archiving operations
The Archive is headquartered inSan Francisco, California. From 1996 to 2009, its headquarters were in thePresidio of San Francisco, a former U.S. military base. Since 2009, its headquarters have been at 300 Funston Avenue in San Francisco, a formerChristian Science Church. At one time, most of its staff worked in itsbook-scanning centers; as of 2019, scanning is performed by 100 paid operators worldwide.[68] The Archive also hasdata centers in three Californian cities: San Francisco,Redwood City, andRichmond. To reduce the risk of data loss, the Archive creates copies of parts of its collection at more distant locations, including theBibliotheca Alexandrina[69][70] inEgypt and a facility inAmsterdam.[71]
As of 2025, it is reported that Internet Archive operates 6 data centers,[72] mainly in California, with smaller ones in other U.S. states, Canada and Europe. They have controlled access and fire protection systems, and are monitored for security. All Internet Archive data centers adhere toISO/IEC 27001 standard, and some of them meet additional certifications.[73]
Since 2016, Internet Archive started to work to create a decentralized prototype of the digital library. From 2020, content from Internet Archive started to be stored inFilecoin.[74] By October 2023, one petabyte of data had been uploaded to the Filecoin network.[75]
TheWayback Machine is a service that allows archives of the World Wide Web to be searched and accessed.[79] It can be used to see what previous versions of web sites used to look like or to visit web sites that no longer even exist. The Wayback Machine was created as a joint effort betweenAlexa Internet (owned byAmazon.com) and the Internet Archive.[14] Hundreds of billions of web sites and their associated data (images, source code, documents, etc.) are saved in a database. As of September 5, 2024[update], the Internet Archive held over 866 billion web pages, more than 42.5 million print materials, 13 million videos, 3 million TV news reports, 1.2 million software programs, 14 million audio files, 5 million images, and 272,660 concerts in its Wayback Machine.[6]
Created in early 2006, Archive-It[80] is a web archiving subscription service that allows institutions and individuals to build and preserve collections of digital content and create digital archives. Archive-It allows the user to customize their capture or exclusion of web content they want to preserve for cultural heritage reasons. Through a web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, browse, search, and view their archived collections.[81]
In terms of accessibility, the archived web sites are full text searchable within seven days of capture.[82] Content collected through Archive-It is captured and stored as aWARC file. A primary and back-up copy is stored at the Internet Archive data centers. A copy of the WARC file can be given to subscribing partner institutions for geo-redundant preservation and storage purposes to their best practice standards.[83] Periodically, the data captured through Archive-It is indexed into the Internet Archive's general archive.
As of March 2014[update], Archive-It had more than 275 partner institutions in 46 U.S. states and 16 countries that have captured more than 7.4 billion URLs for more than 2,444 public collections.[citation needed] Archive-It partners are universities and college libraries, state archives, federal institutions, museums, law libraries, and cultural organizations, including theElectronic Literature Organization, North Carolina State Archives and Library,Stanford University,Columbia University,American University in Cairo, Georgetown Law Library, and many others.[citation needed]
In September 2020, Internet Archive announced a new initiative to archive and preserveopen access academic journals, calledInternet Archive Scholar.[84][85][86] Its full-text search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest open access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.[citation needed]
In 2021, the Internet Archive announced the initial version of theGeneral Index, a publicly availableindex to a collection of 107 million academicjournal articles.[87][88]
The Archive storesfiles inside so-called items, which are similar todirectories in that they can contain multiple files, but can have additionalmetadata such as a description and tags which make them more searchable.
Some file types can be previewed directly on the site, where as others have to be downloaded in order to be opened. If multiple multimedia files exist in an item, the website generates a playlist for video or audio files, or a slide show for pictures. If an item contains at least one video or picture, the Archive generates a previewthumbnail that can be seen on collection pages and in searches. Items can contain mixed data such as music files with an album cover picture, in which case the picture is used as thumbnail.[89][90][91][92]
Staff members of the Internet Archive organize items by placing them into so-called collections, which are pages listing multiple items.[93]
Internet Archive "Scribe"book scanning workstationAn Internet Archive in-house scan ongoing
The scanning performed by the Internet Archive is financially supported by libraries and foundations.[94] As of November 2008[update], when there were approximately 1 million texts, the entire collection was greater than 500 terabytes, which included raw camera images, cropped and skewed images,PDFs, and rawOCR data.[95]
As of July 2013[update], the Internet Archive was operating 33scanning centers in five countries, digitizing about 1,000 books a day for a total of more than 2 million books, in a total collection of 4.4 million books – including material digitized by others and fed into the Internet Archive; at that time, users were performing more than 15 million downloads per month.[96]
The material digitized by others includes more than 300,000 books that were contributed to the collection, between about 2006 and 2008, byMicrosoft through itsLive Search Books project, which also included financial support and scanning equipment directly donated to the Internet Archive.[97] On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced it would be ending its Live Book Search project and would no longer be scanning books, donating its remaining scanning equipment to its former partners.[97]
Around October 2007, Archive users began uploadingpublic domain books fromGoogle Book Search.[98] As of November 2013[update], there were more than 900,000 Google-digitized books in the Archive's collection;[99] the books are identical to the copies found on Google, except without the Google watermarks, and are available for unrestricted use and download.[a] Brewster Kahle revealed in 2013 that this archival effort was coordinated byAaron Swartz, who, with a "bunch of friends", downloaded the public domain books from Google slowly enough and from enough computers to stay within Google's restrictions. They did this to ensure public access to thepublic domain. The Archive ensured the items were attributed and linked back to Google, which never complained, while libraries "grumbled". According to Kahle, this is an example of Swartz's "genius" to work on what could give the most to the public good for millions of people.[100]
In addition to books, the Archive offers free and anonymous public access to more than four million court opinions, legal briefs, or exhibits uploaded from theUnited States Federal Courts'PACER electronic document system via theRECAP web browser plugin. These documents had been kept behind a federal court paywall. On the Archive, they had been accessed by more than six million people by 2013.[100]
The Open Library is another project of the Internet Archive. The project seeks to include a web page for every book ever published: it holds 25 million catalog records of editions. It also seeks to be a web-accessible public library: it contains the full texts of approximately 1,600,000 public domain books (out of the more than five million from the maintexts collection), as well as in-print and in-copyright books,[104] many of which are fully readable, downloadable[105][106] andfull-text searchable;[107] it offers a two-week loan ofe-books in itscontrolled digital lending program for over 647,784 books not in the public domain, in partnership with over 1,000 library partners from six countries[96][108] after a free registration on the web site. Open Library is afree and open-source software project, with its source code freely available onGitHub.
The Open Library faces objections from some authors and theSociety of Authors, who hold that the project is distributing books without authorization and is thus in violation of copyright laws,[109] and four major publishers initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive in June 2020 to stop the Open Library project.[110]
In 2017, theMIT Press authorized the Internet Archive to digitize and lend books from the press'sbacklist,[113] with financial support from theArcadia Fund.[114][115] A year later, the Internet Archive received further funding from the Arcadia Fund to invite some other university presses to partner with the Internet Archive to digitize books, a project called "Unlocking University Press Books".[116][117]
TheLibrary of Congress created numerousHandle System identifiers that pointed to free digitized books in the Internet Archive.[118] The Internet Archive and Open Library are listed on the Library of Congress website as a source of e-books.[119]
Media readerMicrofilms at the Internet ArchiveVideocassettes at the Internet Archive
In addition to web archives, the Internet Archive maintains extensive collections of digital media that are attested by the uploader to be in thepublic domain in the United States or licensed under a license that allows redistribution, such asCreative Commons licenses.[citation needed] Media are organized into collections by media type (moving images, audio, text, etc.), and into sub-collections by various criteria. Each of the main collections includes a "Community" sub-collection (formerly named "Open Source") where general contributions by the public are stored.[citation needed]
TheLive Music Archive sub-collection includes more than 170,000 concert recordings from independent musicians, as well as more established artists and musical ensembles with permissive rules about recording their concerts, such as theGrateful Dead, and more recently,The Smashing Pumpkins. Also,Jordan Zevon has allowed the Internet Archive to host a definitive collection of his fatherWarren Zevon's concert recordings. The Zevon collection ranges from 1976 to 2001 and contains 126 concerts including 1,137 songs.[124]
The Great 78 Project aims to digitize 250,00078 rpm singles (500,000 songs) from the period between 1880 and 1960, donated by various collectors and institutions. It has been developed in collaboration with the Archive of Contemporary Music and George Blood Audio, responsible for the audio digitization.[121]
The Archive has a collection of freely distributable music that is streamed and available for download via itsNetlabels service. The music in this collection generally has Creative Commons-license catalogs of virtual record labels.[125][126]
The Cover Art Archive is a joint project between the Internet Archive andMusicBrainz, whose goal is to make cover art images on the Internet. As of April 2021,[update] this collection contains more than 1,400,000 items.[128]
The NASA Images archive was created through aSpace Act Agreement between the Internet Archive and NASA to bring public access to NASA's image, video, and audio collections in a single, searchable resource. The Internet Archive NASA Images team worked closely with all of the NASA centers to keep adding to the ever-growing collection.[130] The nasaimages.org site launched in July 2008 and had more than 100,000 items online at the end of its hosting in 2012.
This collection containsCreative Commons-licensed photographs from Flickr related to theOccupy Wall Street movement. This collection contains more than 15,000 items.[131]
One of the sub-collections of the Internet Archive's Video Archive is theMachinima Archive. This small section hosts many Machinima videos. Machinima is a digital artform in whichcomputer games,game engines, or software engines are used in a sandbox-like mode to create motion pictures, recreate plays, or even publish presentations or keynotes. The archive collects a range of Machinima films from internet publishers such asRooster Teeth andMachinima.com as well as independent producers. The sub-collection is a collaborative effort among the Internet Archive, the How They Got Game research project at Stanford University, the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, and Machinima.com.[133]
The Internet Archive holds a collection of approximately 3,863 feature films.[136] Additionally, the Internet Archive's Moving Image collection includes:newsreels, classiccartoons, pro- and anti-warpropaganda, The Video Cellar Collection, Skip Elsheimer's "A.V. Geeks" collection, early television, and ephemeral material fromPrelinger Archives, such asadvertising, educational, and industrial films, as well as amateur and home movie collections.[citation needed]
IA'sFedFlix collection, Joint Venture NTIS-1832 between the National Technical Information Service and Public.Resource.Org that features "the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to theU.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors"[137]
IA'sIndependent News collection, which includes sub-collections such as the Internet Archive's World At War competition from 2001, in which contestants created short films demonstrating "why access to history matters". Among their most-downloaded video files are eyewitness recordings of the devastating2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.[citation needed]
IA'sSeptember 11 Television Archive, which contains archival footage from the world's major television networks of theterrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as they unfolded on live television.[138]
In September 2012, the Internet Archive launched the TV News Search & Borrow service for searching U.S. national news programs.[140] The service is built on closed captioning transcripts and allows users to search and stream 30-second video clips. Upon launch, the service contained "350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C."[141] According to Kahle, the service was inspired by theVanderbilt Television News Archive, a similar library of televised network news programs.[142] In contrast to Vanderbilt, which limits access to streaming video to individuals associated with subscribing colleges and universities, the TV News Search & Borrow allows open access to its streaming video clips. In 2013, the Archive received an additional donation of "approximately 40,000 well-organized tapes" from the estate of aPhiladelphia woman,Marion Stokes. Stokes "had recorded more than 35 years of TV news in Philadelphia andBoston with herVHS andBetamax machines."[143]
Brooklyn Museum collection contains approximately 3,000 items fromBrooklyn Museum.[144] In December 2020, the film research library ofLillian Michelson was donated to the archive.[145]
A vintage wall intercom, an example of another "archived" item
Voicing a strong reaction to the idea of books simply being thrown away, and inspired by theSvalbard Global Seed Vault, Kahle now envisions collecting one copy of every book ever published. "We're not going to get there, but that's our goal", he said. Alongside the books, Kahle plans to store the Internet Archive's old servers, which were replaced in 2010.[146]
Vault is a digital repository and preservation service provided by Internet Archive to institutions that need to preserve digital collections. Data stored in Vault is kept in at least 2 different Internet Archive datacenters, with at least 2 copies in each of them. Access control, fire protection and monitoring systems are used to protect all content stored in Vault.[72]
The Internet Archive has "the largest collection of historical software online in the world", spanning 50 years ofcomputer history interabytes of computer magazines and journals, books,shareware discs, FTP sites,video games, etc. The Internet Archive has created an archive of what it describes as "vintage software", as a way to preserve them.[147] The project advocated an exemption from the United StatesDigital Millennium Copyright Act to permit them to bypasscopy protection, which theUnited States Copyright Office approved in 2003 for a period of three years.[148] The Archive does not offer the software for download, as the exemption is solely "for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive."[149] TheLibrary of Congress renewed the exemption in 2006, and in 2009 indefinitely extended it pending further rulemakings.[150] The Library reiterated the exemption as a "Final Rule" with no expiration date in 2010.[151] In 2013, the Internet Archive began to provide select video gamesbrowser-playable viaMESS, for instance theAtari 2600 gameE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.[152] Since December 23, 2014, the Internet Archive presents, via a browser-basedDOSBox emulation, thousands ofDOS/PC games[153][154][155][156] for "scholarship and research purposes only".[157][158][159] In November 2020, the Archive introduced a new emulator forAdobe Flash calledRuffle, and began archiving Flash animations and games ahead of the December 31, 2020, end-of-life for the Flash plugin across all computer systems.[160]
From 2012 to November 2015, the Internet Archive operated the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, afederal credit union based inNew Brunswick, New Jersey, with the goal of providing access to low- and middle-income people. Throughout its short existence, the IAFCU experienced significant conflicts with theNational Credit Union Administration, which severely limited the IAFCU's loan portfolio and concerns over servingBitcoin firms. At the time of its dissolution, it consisted of 395 members and was worth $2.5 million.[163][164]
Since 2019,[165] the Internet Archive organizes an event called Decentralized Web Camp (DWeb Camp). It is an annual camp that brings together a diverse global community of contributors in a natural setting. The camp aims to tackle real-world challenges facing the web and co-create decentralized technologies for a better internet. It aims to foster collaboration, learning, and fun while promoting principles of trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness.[166]
Screenshot of viewing English Wikipedia on the Wayforward Machine
On September 30, 2021, as a part of its 25th anniversary celebration, Internet Archive launched the "Wayforward Machine", asatirical,fictional website covered with pop-ups asking for personal information. The site was intended to depict afictionaldystopian timeline of real-world events leading to such a future, such as the repeal ofSection 230 of theUnited States Code in 2022 and the introduction of advertising implants in 2041.[167][168]
The Great Room of the Internet Archive features a collection of more than 100ceramic figures representing employees of the Internet Archive, with the 100th statue immortalizingAaron Swartz. This collection, inspired by thestatues of the Xian warriors in China, was commissioned by Brewster Kahle, sculpted byNuala Creed, and as of 2014, is ongoing.[169]
The Internet Archive visual arts residency,[170] organized by Amir Saber Esfahani, is designed to connect emerging and mid-career artists with the Archive's millions of collections and to show what is possible when openaccess to information intersects with the arts. During this one-year residency, selected artists develop a body of work that responds to and utilizes the Archive's collections in their own practice.[171]
On May 8, 2008, it was revealed that the Internet Archive had successfully challenged anFBInational security letter asking for logs on an undisclosed user.[177][178]
On November 28, 2016, it was revealed that a second FBI national security letter had been successfully challenged that had been asking for logs on another undisclosed user.[179]
The Internet Archive is a member of theOpen Book Alliance, which has been among the most outspoken critics of theGoogle Book Settlement. The Archive advocates an alternative digital library project.[181]
On October 9, 2016, the Internet Archive was temporarily blocked inTurkey after it was used (amongst other file hosting services) by hackers to host 17 GB of leaked government emails.[182][183]
Because the Internet Archive only lightly moderates uploads, it includes resources that may be valued by extremists and the site may be used by them to evadeblock listing. In February 2018, the Counter Extremism Project said that the Archive hosted terrorist videos, including the beheading ofAlan Henning, and had declined to respond to requests about the videos.[184] In May 2018, a report published by the cyber-security firm Flashpoint stated that theIslamic State was using the Internet Archive to share its propaganda.[185] Chris Butler, from the Internet Archive, responded that they regularly spoke to the US and EU governments about sharing information on terrorism.[185] In April 2019,Europol, acting on a referral from French police, asked the Internet Archive to remove 550 sites of "terrorist propaganda".[186] The Archive rejected the request, saying that the reports were wrong about the content they pointed to, or were too broad for the organization to comply with.[186] On July 14, 2021, the Internet Archive held a joint "Referral Action Day" with Europol to target terrorist videos.[187]
A 2021 article said thatjihadists regularly used the Internet Archive for "dead drops" of terrorist videos.[188] In January 2022, a formerUCLA lecturer's 800-page manifesto, containing racist ideas and threats against UCLA staff, was uploaded to the Internet Archive.[189] The manifesto was removed by the Internet Archive after a week, amidst discussion about whether such documents should be preserved by archivists or not.[189] Another 2022 paper found "an alarming volume of terrorist, extremist, and racist material on the Internet Archive".[190] A 2023 paper reported that Neo-Nazis collect links to online, publicly available resources to be shared with new recruits. As the Internet Archive hosts uploaded texts that are not allowed on other websites, Nazi and neo-Nazi books in the Archive (e.g.,The Turner Diaries) frequently appear on these lists. These lists also feature older, public domain material created when white supremacist views were more mainstream.[191]
In the midst of theCOVID-19 pandemic which closed many schools, universities, and libraries, the Archive announced on March 24, 2020, that it was creating the National Emergency Library by removing the lending restrictions it had in place for 1.4 million digitized books in its Open Library but otherwise limiting users to the number of books they could check out and enforcing their return; normally, the site would only allow one digital lending for each physical copy of the book they had, by use of anencrypted file that would become unusable after the lending period was completed.[5] This Library would remain as such until at least June 30, 2020, or until the US national emergency was over, whichever came later.[192] At launch, the Internet Archive allowed authors and rightholders to submit opt-out requests for their works to be omitted from the National Emergency Library.[193][194][195]
The Internet Archive said the National Emergency Library addressed an "unprecedented global and immediate need for access to reading and research material" due to the closures of physical libraries worldwide.[196] They justified the move in a number of ways. Legally, they said they were promoting access to those inaccessible resources, which they claimed was an exercise infair use principles. The Archive continued implementing theircontrolled digital lending policy that predated the National Emergency Library, meaning they still encrypted the lent copies and it was no easier for users to create new copies of the books than before. An ultimate determination of whether or not the National Emergency Library constituted fair use could only be made by a court. Morally, they also pointed out that the Internet Archive was a registered library like any other, that they either paid for the books themselves or received them as donations, and that lending through libraries predated copyright restrictions.[193][197]
The Archive had already been criticized by authors and publishers for its prior lending approach, and upon announcement of the National Emergency Library, authors, publishers, and groups representing both took further issue with The Archive and itsOpen Library project, equating the move tocopyright infringement and digital piracy, and using the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to push the boundaries of copyright.[195][198][199][200] After the works of some of these authors were ridiculed in responses, the Internet Archive'sJason Scott requested that supporters of the National Emergency Library not denigrate anyone's books: "I realize there's strong debate and disagreement here, but books are life-giving and life-changing and these writers made them."[201]
On 27 May 2025, theMinistry of Communication and Digital Affairs of Indonesia (Kominfo) blocked access to the Internet Archive in Indonesia.[202] Alexander Sabar, the Director of the Supervision of Digital Space (Komdigi), stated that the reason was the presence of pornography and online gambling on the site. He denied a rumor that there was motive to rewrite or hide history. He also acknowledged the importance of the Internet Archive, and claimed that the blocking was temporary and would be rescinded if they removed the offending content, and they only blocked it after the Internet Archive didn't respond to requests.[203][204]
In November 2005, free downloads ofGrateful Dead concerts were removed from the site, following what seemed to be disagreements between some of the former band members.John Perry Barlow identifiedBob Weir,Mickey Hart, andBill Kreutzmann as the instigators of the change, according to an article inThe New York Times.[205]Phil Lesh, a founding member of the band, commented on the change in a November 30, 2005, posting to his personal web site:
It was brought to my attention that all of the Grateful Dead shows were taken down from Archive.org right beforeThanksgiving. I was not part of this decision making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead's legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it.[206]
A November 30 forum post fromBrewster Kahle summarized what appeared to be the compromise reached among the band members. Audience recordings could be downloaded or streamed, butsoundboard recordings were to be available for streaming only. Concerts have since been re-added.[207]
In February 2016, Internet Archive users had begun archiving digital copies ofNintendo Power,Nintendo's official magazine for their games and products, which ran from 1988 to 2012. The first 140 issues had been collected, before Nintendo had the archive removed on August 8, 2016. In response to the take-down, Nintendo told gaming websitePolygon, "[Nintendo] must protect our own characters, trademarks and other content. The unapproved use of Nintendo's intellectual property can weaken our ability to protect and preserve it, or to possibly use it for new projects".[208]
In August 2017, theDepartment of Telecommunications of theGovernment of India blocked the Internet Archive along with other file-sharing websites, in accordance with two court orders issued by theMadras High Court,[209] citing piracy concerns after copies of twoBollywood films were allegedly shared via the service.[210] TheHTTP version of the Archive was blocked but it remained accessible using theHTTPS protocol.[209]
In 2023, the Internet Archive became a popular site for Indians to watch the first episode ofIndia: The Modi Question,[211] a BBC documentary released on January 17 and banned in India by January 20.[212][213] The video was reported to have been removed by the Archive on January 23.[211] The Internet Archive then stated, on January 27, that they had removed the video in response to a BBC request under theDigital Millennium Copyright Act.[214]
The operation of the National Emergency Library was part of a lawsuit filed against the Internet Archive by four major book publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—in June 2020, challenging the copyright validity of the controlled digital lending program.[5][110][215] In response, the Internet Archive closed the National Emergency Library on June 16, 2020, rather than the planned June 30, 2020, due to the lawsuit.[216][217] The plaintiffs, supported by theCopyright Alliance,[218] claimed in their lawsuit that the Internet Archive's actions constituted a "willful mass copyright infringement."[219]
Judge Koeltl ruled on March 24, 2023, against Internet Archive in the case, saying the National Emergency Library concept was not fair use, so the Archive infringed their copyrights by lending out the books without the waitlist restriction. An agreement was then reached for the Internet Archive to pay an undisclosed amount to the publishers.[220] The Internet Archive appealed the ruling.[221][222] On September 4, 2024, theU.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the district court's ruling, calling the Internet Archive's argument that they were shielded by fair use doctrine "unpersuasive".[223]
In August 2023, themusic industry corporationsUniversal Music Group (UMG),Sony Music andConcord sued the Internet Archive over its Great 78 Project, asserting the project was engaged in copyright infringement. The Great 78 Project stores digitized versions of pre-1972 songs and albums from 78 rpmphonograph records, for "the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records." The project had started in 2016, when pre-1972 recordings had not been protected by copyright; in 2018, the U.S. Congress passed theMusic Modernization Act (MMA) which enabledlegal remedies for unauthorised use of pre-1972 recordings until 2067, thus effectively covering them with copyright.[224]
UMG and Sony had been the two largest companies in this sector for more than a decade, with respective market shares of 31.8% and 22.1% in 2023.[225] Concord was a rapidly expanding music business closely partnered with UMG since its transformation into Concord Music Group in 2004[226] and backed since at least 2000 byJ.P. Morgan.[227] It was the first music company to perform anasset-backedsecuritization, led byApollo Global Management, in December 2022. Its assets consisted of over 1 million copyrights to music older than 18 months.[228][229] According to its CEO Bob Valentine, Concord derived about 85% of its revenue "from catalog, rather than newly-developed, music". As Valentine stated in his first interview, "The phenomenon of artists' IP has never been more liquid; it is now a real and proven asset class. Investment bankers are focused on it, financiers are financing it, and then there's entities like us, that know how to buy rights, but also know how to manage them and have the relationships to do so."[226] The share of catalog music in total album equivalent consumption in the United States rose from 62.8% to 72.6% between 2019 and 2023.[230]
The publishers are seeking statutory damages for nearly 4,142 songs named in the suit, with a maximum possible fine of $621 million.[231] The Internet Archive has argued that the primitive sound quality of the original recordings falls within the doctrine of "fair use" to digitize for preservation, that the number of downloads is so small it has almost no impact on the publishers' revenue, and over 95% of the collection is not readily available anywhere else.[231] The plaintiffs said in response, "if ever there were a theory of fair use invented for litigation, this is it."[232] According to a legal source atMayer Brown, the music publishers' case could be challenged asunconstitutional, since the granting of copyright to pre-1972 works in the MMA only benefitted record companies without having a systemic effect.[224]
^Books imported from Google have a metadata tag of scanner:google for searching purposes. The archive provides a link to Google for PDF copies, but also maintains a local PDF copy, which is viewable under the "All Files: HTTPS" link. As all the other books in the collection, they also provide OCR text and images in open formats, particularlyDjVu, which Google Books does not offer.
^Hanamura, Wendy (May 30, 2017)."MIT Press Classics Available Soon at Archive.org".blog.archive.org. RetrievedJune 27, 2020.For more than eighty years, MIT Press has been publishing acclaimed titles in science, technology, art and architecture. Now, thanks to a new partnership between the Internet Archive and MIT Press, readers will be able to borrow these classics online for the first time.
^Freeland, Chris (May 21, 2018)."Internet Archive awarded grant from Arcadia Fund to digitize university press collections".blog.archive.org. RetrievedJune 27, 2020.Internet Archive has received a $1 million dollar grant from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – to digitize titles from university press collections to make them available via controlled digital lending.
^Library of CongressCopyright Office (November 27, 2006)."Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies".Federal Register.71 (227):68472–68480. Archived fromthe original on November 1, 2007. RetrievedOctober 21, 2007.Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
^Kahle, Brewster; Vernon, Matt (December 1, 2005)."Good News and an Apology: GD on the Internet Archive".Live Music Archive Forum. Internet Archive.Archived from the original on August 6, 2014.Authors and date indicate the first posting in the forum thread.
^Butler, Chris (January 27, 2023)."BBC Modi Documentary Removal". Internet Archive.Archived from the original on October 12, 2024. RetrievedJanuary 29, 2023.
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