At its best, the Internet is a place where community is built and where community is preserved.
One of the most important arenas where the latter occurs is a nonprofit called The Internet Archive. Founded in 1996, Internet Archive is an online library that describes itself as “a nonprofit fighting for universal access to quality information.”
Internet Archive preserves millions of books, radio dramas, concert videos, audio interviews, and more. In addition to this, one of Internet Archive’s most ambitious and most valuable endeavors is The Wayback Machine, which digitally preserves webpages at a particular moment in time. Through the Wayback Machine, we have access to historical views of websites, blog posts, tweets, etc. that would otherwise be lost to hacker attacks, self-deletion, domain lapses, or simply gradual updates.
The Wayback Machine claims to have preserved more than 916 billion such webpages. (Ever want a fun nostalgia trip? Get on the Wayback Machine and type in a URL that you frequently visited 15 years ago. For me, it’s www.lego.com.)
A coalition of major record labels is suing Internet Archive for an obscene amount of money over IA’s “Great 78s” project, an effort to preserve historical recordings made on 78rpm shellac records.
If they succeed, there is a good chance that The Internet Archive and all that it has meticulously preserved will cease to exist.
The article you’re reading now is a call to action.
Fight for the Future has put together a petition that hundreds of musicians have already signed. You can sign it today.
Much of our shared cultural history from recent decades has occurred online, and The Internet Archive is the most thorough record of that history. Not to mention the countless pre-Internet documents digitized for the first time through IA’s work.
Here are a few example anecdotes:
“Instead of paying musicians fair compensation for their art, major record labels are suing to destroy the Internet Archive, claiming that their research library of old music recordings is what’s really hurting musicians,” says the petition introduction. “We all know this just isn’t true.” (The petition is very much worth reading in full.)
One of the most valuable attributes of digital media is the ability to preserve large amounts of information from our shared cultural history in a way that is easily accessible to many many users.
Sign the petition demanding big record labels drop their suit to destroy the Internet Archive today by clicking here.
Thanks for reading.
*Note: This article originally appeared in Midnight Donuts.
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