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The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself
The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away.
Kahle is now the merry custodian to a uniquely comprehensive catalog, spanning all manner of digital and physical media, from classic video games to live recordings of concerts to magazines and newspapers to books from around the world. (Get him started on the topic, and he’ll likely point out that both ebook distributor OverDrive and publishing company Simon & Schuster are owned by the global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.) He’s keenly aware that everything he has built is in danger. “There is a misperception that things on the web are forever—but they really, really aren't,” says Craig Silverman, who thinks the nonprofit’s demise would make certain types of scholarship and reporting “way more difficult, if not impossible,” in addition to representing a disappearance of a bastion of collective memory.
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