The internet’s memory is under threat

MTV News was once a go-to source for information not just about the music scene (yes kids, Music Television once focused on music) but also politics and other cultural subjects. But its moment passed, and last year MTV closed it down. And, as of yesterday, the MTV News website is also gone, taking with it the vast archive of content created between 1996 and 2013.

As Variety reports, social media is ablaze with former MTV News staffers who are outraged at their work disappearing. “Decades of music history gone,” lamented former entertainment director Crystal Bell. “Eight years of my life are gone without a trace. All because it didn't fit some executives' bottom lines,” wrote former music editor Patrick Hosken. (The executives in question would be at MTV owner Paramount Global, which hasn’t commented on the archive’s removal.)

It's not unusual for an online journalist to see their old work disappear. I’ve certainly experienced this many times, either because the publication I wrote for went bust (Gigaom) or because it went through major changes that broke many of its old links (ZDNet). It’s always frustrating, and it must be particularly painful when the content’s current owner easily has the resources to keep it online indefinitely.

Thank goodness, then, for the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, which makes a valiant effort to preserve online content for posterity. One example that’s meaningful to me: I’m still darn proud of a Gigaom article I wrote in mid-2013, when the very first of Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. online surveillance came out, and I correctly predicted that the privacy implications would become a nightmare for U.S. tech firms serving European customers—thankfully, the piece survives in the Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, most older MTV News articles do not, but some do, and some is better than none.

However, even the survival of the Internet Archive is no sure thing. The nonprofit digital library has in recent years become the target of lawsuits by copyright holders, who are outraged at the works they own being made available without their permission.

The most urgent case involves the Archive’s digital lending program, through which people can borrow digital versions of books, much like they would do in a physical library. The Archive contains many old, out-of-print books that it has digitized and gives out freely, but it also buys and lends out more current books, as libraries tend to do.

The Archive usually lends out each copy of a copyrighted book to one person at a time, but it opened a short-lived “National Emergency Library” in the early days of the COVID pandemic, allowing multiple people to borrow a single copy simultaneously. The biggest publishing groups—Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Wiley—sued in 2020, accusing the Archive of “mass copyright infringement,” and last year they won in a lower court, leading to some 500,000 of the plaintiffs’ books being removed from the Internet Archive’s library. Over 1,300 are books that have been banned or challenged in some places, making it very difficult for people to otherwise access them.

The Archive launched an appeal, which will finally be heard this coming Friday. Founder Brewster Kahle is pitching this as a fight for the future of libraries and democracy itself, arguing that “we need secure access to the historical record.”

But that isn’t the only legal challenge the Archive is having to deal with. Last year, Sony and other music majors sued over the Archive’s repository of digitized versions of crackly old vinyl records that had been donated to it. The labels want damages totaling $372 million. If they get their way, Kahle warned in a CBS interview on Sunday, that could put an end to the entire Internet Archive.

This would be truly disastrous. The online world may frequently seem ephemeral, but it’s a huge part of how we interact with and understand the “real” world. With print now relegated to the sidelines, and with the media business being as volatile as it is, future historians without a Wayback Machine may one day find themselves with few original sources to analyze—just the mangled recollections of AI models that were once trained on content that turned out to be all too fragile.

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David Meyer

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com