RollingStone via MSN [no paywall]: “Major record labels have sued the online library Internet Archive over thousands of old recordings, raising the question: Who owns the past?Before founding the Internet Archive, Kahle worked as a computer scientist, making major contributions to personal computing and the early internet during the Eighties and Nineties. With the Archive, he says, “The whole idea was to build the Library of Alexandria for the digital age. To build universal access to all knowledge.” The Archive is best known for its preservation of the ephemeral expanses of the World Wide Web, available through its one-of-a-kind archive/search engine, the Wayback Machine. But this is just one facet of its collection: Working with museums, libraries, and individual donors and contributors, the Archive has amassed more than 145 petabytes of material (if you took more than 4,000 digital photos every day for the rest of your life, you might end up with 1 petabyte). Much of this material is obsolete or out of print – books, microfilm and microfiche, old software, video games, obscure VHS tapes, TV news programs, historic radio shows, and hundreds of thousands of concert recordings. “It’s a research library. It’s there to record and make available an accurate version of the past,” Kahle says. “Otherwise, we’ll end up with a George Orwell world where the past can be manipulated and erased.” But this work has long rankled one of the most powerful forces in the United States – rights holders – and the threat of copyright lawsuits has always loomed over the Archive. Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar and Archive ally, even predicted Kahle would wind up in court in a 2001 New York Times interview, days after the Wayback Machine launched. It took nearly two decades – during which the Archive occasionally faced smaller legal challenges – but Lessig was right. In June 2020, several book publishers sued the Internet Archive following the launch of its pandemic-era National Emergency Library, which made its collection of scanned books available to borrow freely and without restrictions amid school, university, and library closures. The publishers claimed mass, willful copyright infringement and won a summary judgment in the lower courts last March. (The Archive appealed, but lost again earlier this month.)…”