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Are we doing enough to save the internet?

We all know how important the internet has become to almost every man, woman and child in the Western world.

There have been so many things published online, and only online, that we need to preserve if we are to be able to accurately follow the history of our society, our cultures and our achievements.

Sadly, unlike printed or other physical forms of media, the internet is etherial in nature. It exists in this strange ether that is constantly in a state of flux. There are no guarantees that the website, podcast or video you enjoyed today, will still be available or accessible tomorrow.

Indeed, a huge amount of the material that has been published to the internet is already gone forever.

Or is it?

Thanks to The Internet Archive, at least some of our online history is being preserved.

Although it is not a complete record of everything that has ever been published online, the Internet Archive (TIA) does a pretty good job of snapshotting various websites and their content for posterity.

Sadly however, there are a growing number of commercial entities that are unhappy with what TIA are doing and some have even filed legal actions designed to thwart this non-profit's attempts to record our history.

The most recent of these cases was brought by a consortium of music labels who allege that by archiving content that was not legally licensed, and thereby breaches their copyrights, TIA themselves are guilty of such a breach.

Another lawsuit came from major book publishers who claimed that TIA was scanning books and effectively making copies of those scans available to multiple parties concurrently -- thus breaching copyright.

Although I can perhaps understand the book publishers' case, I certainly believe that TIA has to be cut some slack from a legal perspective.

Surely there has to be some kind of exemption to copyright law put in place for a non-profit organisation that simply seeks to preserve works for posterity but which may, in the process, "technically" breach the rights of copyright holders.

One thing is for sure, the book publishers and record labels themselves will only preserve such works when it is profitable to do so. Once the copyright expires then you can bet that they'll ditch their own copies to save on storage. If there aren't copies held by independent organisations intent on archiving them for historical purposes then huge chunks of our history will be lost.

We're already in the undesirable position that if we were to suffer a major catastrophe, such as a mega-CME or something else that would effectively destroy our online world then a generation later, nobody would really have a clear record of some really important elements of our society and our culture -- because it was all online.

Try explaining how social media changed the world when there is no longer an internet and all those postings, videos and other material has long ago ceased to exist. This is the challenge we now face, whether The Internet Archive exists or not.

TIA isn't perfect and it's not a guaranteed solution but right now it's all we've got so it would be a really good idea to ensure that it isn't destroyed by the commercial greed of those who see the chance to sue a non-profit for hundreds of millions of dollars simply because the law allows it.

Carpe Diem folks!

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