Since founding the Internet Archive in 1996, Brewster Kahle has helped preserve nearly three decades of digital history—along with millions of books, audio recordings, videos, images, and software programs. But in 2023, four major publishers successfully sued the Archive, forcing it to remove their copyrighted books from its digital lending library.
Now the Archive is under attack again, as a music industry copyright infringement lawsuit against it seeks nearly $700 million in damages related to the Archive’s Great 78 preservation initiative. American Libraries caught up with Kahle to discuss the lawsuit, the Archive’s future, and the developments making him feel “very encouraged.”
What’s the latest with the music industry lawsuit?
This is about the Great 78 Project, which is a project of 100 libraries and collectors working together to preserve 78 RPM records from about 1898 to the 1950s. What we’re doing is trying to provide an idea of: What did America sound like during the first half of the 20th century, scratches and all? You get songs that are yodeling, whistling, playing spoons. There are recordings of preachers that are very close to rap music. It’s fantastic and deep and wonderful. And [the plaintiffs] want it all gone.
The Great 78 Project had been going on for 10 years, and the lawyers for the record industry didn’t tell us—over 10 years—that they were unhappy. Now they’re suing for what could be $700 million. If the Internet Archive has to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, the Internet Archive is gone.
Usually this sort of thing is between billion-dollar corporations, not between billion-dollar corporations and what amounts to a small library just being a library. Are they after money, or are they out to kill us? The case right now is stalled to let the parties try to come to some conclusion.
You can’t predict the future, of course. But how do you feel most days about what lies ahead?
I generally wake up very encouraged by the reactions we get from users and patrons and really thoughtful and helpful libraries. People are continuing to amaze me. They don’t want just the propaganda they’re getting through the paid-for media channels. They don’t want to be lied to. They will do the real work to try to come to a real understanding.
What I see out of the billion-dollar media conglomerates, what I see out of government actors around the world, is posing a challenge to a world that I assumed would go on and on. But we are prepared to deal with a world that has changed. The bad behavior is growing on the part of corporations, legislatures, politicians, the judiciary. But we’re still here. We’re not dead yet.
How has the work of the Internet Archive been affected since Trump took office?
Well, the biggest effect has been getting a lot of attention for what we do. We spend a lot of time on Democracy’s Library, which is a name for collecting all the born-digital and digitized publications of government at the federal, state, and municipal levels. There’s been so much attention about all of the [digital] takedowns that we’ve received lots and lots of volunteer help toward collecting not only web assets but also databases that are being removed from government websites. It’s all hands on deck.
And you just launched a new YouTube channel.
Yes, we unveiled our next-generation microfiche scanning as part of our Democracy’s Library project, because a lot of .gov sites are on microfiche, and people don’t want to use microfiche anymore. Fortunately, the US government in its early era was pro–access to information and made government documents public domain. So we put out a YouTube livestream of the microfiche being digitized.
What would you like to see libraries and librarians do during this challenging time?
We need libraries to have at least as good rights in the digital world as we have in the physical world. There’s an upcoming website [from the Internet Archive and others] called the Four Digital Rights of Libraries, and that is something libraries can sign onto as institutions. [The website will launch during the Association of European Research Libraries’ LIBER 2025 Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2-4.]
People generally don’t know that libraries, in this digital era, are prevented from buying any ebooks or MP3s. They are not allowed by the publishers to have them. They spend and spend and spend, but they don’t end up owning anything. They’re not building collections. So the publishers can change or delete anything at any time, and they do. In their dream case, libraries will never own anything ever again. This is a structural attack on libraries. You don’t need to be a deep historian to know what happens to libraries. They’re actively destroyed by the powerful.
So let’s spend [our collection budgets] buying ebooks, buying music, buying material from small publishers or anybody [else] that will actually sell to us. Make it so we are building our own collections, not this licensing thing where these books disappear.
That’s a big ask. But the great thing about that will be that our libraries start buying things from small publishers, where most of the money goes back to the authors, not stopping with the big multinational publishers. Let’s build a system that works for more players than just big corporations that make a habit of suing libraries.
