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[…] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
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Because they’re getting punished for providing books to people, while OpenAI & friends have been infringing copyright on a much, much bigger scale, and getting away with it. As always, the point isn’t author’s rights, it’s money.
Based on what? Distributing numbers in a big database doesn’t infringe on copyright, and downloading a web page or image doesn’t either.
You’re right, I apologize, my use of “infringing copyright” was too loose there. What I meant in that context is more like “stealing and then re-selling the identity and essence of every human creation to ever be made into ones and zeros”