The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

The internet is ephemeral, with the average life of a web page – before it's changed or deleted – about 100 days. And so, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been making backups of websites every day since 1996, with nearly 900 billion pages preserved, available to all. But making books and music freely available has led to several lawsuits brought by record labels and the book publishing industry. Correspondent David Pogue reports.

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[apotatoninja]

Protect the internet archive at all costs.

[GVSQ]

So glad major news outlets are covering this vital piece of internet infrastructure.

[TheGreatAtario]

If I had my way, the Internet Archive would be a branch of the Library Of Congress and would receive an automatic exemption from any and all copy restrictions

[Bot-Mann]

internet archive is the #1 most important website on the entire internet.
there is so much media that's worth checking out and archive makes it so accessible. i literally don't know what i'd do without it, there's so many old video games, tv shows, movies, albums, and books that are so hard to find already as it is. getting rid of the internet archive would be disastrous

[susannpatton]

He created a internet library. That's fantastic! History saved for real. They will try to bring that down now.

[omi_god]

Do public libraries have to ask publishers' permission to loan books to people? That's what the Internet Archive is doing - it's not SELLING anything - it's just making stuff available to check out, the same as a brick-and-mortar library.
I guess the publishers would also be happy to see all of our public libraries closed as well.

[NathanPatton]

The internet archive must survive. I remember reading about a fire that they had in 2013 and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the headline back then.

[jmreagle]

This is a critical cultural resource, that I have donated to for many years.

[thewebstylist]

This is an absolutely invaluable resource w for when I have web design clients who’ve lost their old websites or have been hacked and I can recover all of the old content for them, I hope and pray they will survive the lawsuits and be around always! PRICELESS

[FadeAwayIntoDarkness]

The Internet Archive is such an important resource. Think of all the movies, books, TV episodes, pamphlets, zines, games, etc, that have been lost to time. So often, those things are lost because the copyright holders have no interest in preserving them and won't do so if given the chance. Can we trust those same copyright holders to not destroy any traces of their properties before the copyright is up?
The Internet Archive must be protected and preserved.

[deltaray]

Good, hopefully this will bring in more supporters so that the Internet Archive doesn't go away. It needs your support.

[susannpatton]

He has created an internet library
That's ingenious for real

[joeybaseball]

It's literally just a library. You go to a library and check out a book. Same here. Not illegal.

[Sela]

The Internet Archive is fundamental the continued development of our culture. When we look back at pre-Information Age society we have letters, journals, books, and more to understand and in some ways interact with the past. What will our posterity have to similarly engage with their past? If not for something like the IA we would leave scant few details of our world for our descendants to see what life was like as we moved into the era of computers and the internet. If we leave nothing for them to understand their past, to see where they came from, how will they understand themselves? We rely on our past to relativistically understand how far we’ve come and what has yet to be accomplished. Copyright is important, it allows a person to own an idea and profit off of it. However, there must be a balance between the pursuit of profit and access to one of humanity’s greatest stores of knowledge and everyday thoughts.

[KarenPilarAraujo]

Good work, CBS! This is important on a deep level. How visionary of Mr. Kahle to embarked on this back in the 90s! We owe librarians the world. (I got an extra boost of happiness when I saw the brief Prince of Persia clip!)

[KiraLawliet]

The fact that the Archive is in jeopardy just from selling some copyrighted books is a travesty of the in-justice system. If the problem is just giving out copyrighted books, then just remove THOSE BOOKS from the archive, or better yet, reimburse the publishers for the amount lost and continue to lease them out at profit to the publishers. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why the ENTIRE ARCHIVE should be in danger of being shut down for this. And any judge that rules against the Archive is guilty of a crime against humanity and should be punished harshly. Losing the Internet Archive would be a greater loss to the human race than the burning of the Library of Alexandria by orders of magnitude. This is an issue that should transcend our laws—ANY attempt to erase this much history should be stopped regardless of what the law says.

[JillWhitcomb]

I had no idea that this existed, at all. But now I know where to find the magazine articles that I wrote some 20 years ago. Thanks!

[robbiecheung]

I was working on my political philosophy capstone project (i.e., final-year project) but the work of philosophers, as you may know, are lengthy but inaccessible on the internet. I also browsed the database of my university library, but I still could not find some of the work. In particular, I had to find the translated manuscript of Immanuel Kant for more accurate interpretations of his ideas.

Then, I found the Internet Archive. End of story.

It is really a lifesaver. Thank you so much, the Internet Archive.

[cgimovieman]

In some ways, this makes me chuckle. I’ve been using the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive for years and years now, probably since it started. CBS Sunday sometimes feels very old-person oriented. As if that demographic had no idea about this and are just being clued into it like it’s a new thing. It is a really interesting thing to explore though. With the constant changes and advances to webpages, you don’t realize just how basic they used to be say in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The change has happened so slowly and naturally like a pot of water heating up, that it’s easy to forget. Early pages were mostly text, with most having no videos, and not even many photos. Those elements took so long to load back then that they weren’t as ubiquitous as today.

[phototristan]

How can they be sued when libraries can't? It's literally the same.