Internet Archive's Legal Fights Are Over, But Its Founder Mourns What Was Lost

The Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth webpage last month and received congratulations from San Francisco, which declared October 22 'Internet Archive Day.' Senator Alex Padilla designated the nonprofit a federal depository library. The organization currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. But these victories arrived after years of bruising copyright battles that forced the removal of more than 500,000 books from the Archive's Open Library. 'We survived, but it wiped out the Library,' founder Brewster Kahle told ArsTechnica.

In 2024, the Archive lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over its e-book lending model. Damages could have topped $400 million before publishers announced a confidential settlement. Last month, the organization settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. That settlement was also confidential. In both cases, the Archive's experts challenged publishers' estimates as massively inflated.

Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a way for Wikipedia to link to book scans and help researchers reference e-books. The Archive wanted to deepen Wikipedia's authority as a research tool by surfacing information often buried in books. 'That's what they really succeeded at -- to make sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books,' Kahle said of the publishers. He thinks 'the world became stupider' when the Open Library was gutted. The Archive is now expanding Democracy's Library, a free online compendium of government research and publications that will be linked in Wikipedia articles.

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