The internet's memory is under threat (2024)

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.

More news below.

David Meyer

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NEWSWORTHY

Microsoft’s EU charges. Apple isn’t the only Big Tech firm to feel the wrath of Europe’s antitrust regulators this week. Today, the European Commission also hit Microsoft with preliminary charges over its bundling of Teams with its Office productivity suites, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Commission says this may have given Teams a distribution advantage over rivals such as Slack—whose complaint triggered the investigation. Microsoft has recently started offering productivity suites without Teams, but the Commission says these changes are “insufficient to address its concerns.”

Apple and Meta. As noted in yesterday’s Data Sheet, Apple reportedly held talks with Meta about integrating its AI into iOS. However, Bloomberg now reports that those talks ended months ago, with Apple deciding Meta’s privacy practices were too lax. Apple is now integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT into iOS, and is still talking to rivals such as Google and Anthropic.

OpenAI spending spree. OpenAI has acqui-hired the team behind the enterprise video collaboration platform Multi, according to TechCrunch. The acquisition comes days after OpenAI bought database outfit Rockset, which again points to OpenAI’s enterprise ambitions.

ON OUR FEED

“The ban is not a subject we’ve been talking about a lot.”

—Blake Chandlee, a senior ByteDance executive, had a lot to tell ad execs in Cannes about TikTok’s latest AI innovations, but not much about the U.S. ban it may soon face, Semafor reports.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Nvidia sees over $500 billion wiped off value after shares slide—the biggest 3-day value loss for any company in history, by Christiaan Hetzner

Exclusive: Andreessen Horowitz plans to launch a private equity fund, documents show, by Jessica Mathews

Google Shopping’s new exec spent 15 years at Amazon: Here’s his plan to hijack Prime Day, by Jason Del Rey

AI could kill creative jobs that ‘shouldn’t have been there in the first place,’ OpenAI’s CTO says, by Sydney Lake

Amazon’s money-bleeding Alexa division could face more cuts if a paid version of its AI-enabled voice assistant flops, BofA says, by Will Daniel

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to Espionage Act charge in deal with U.S. and return home free to Australia, by the Associated Press

BEFORE YOU GO

French election fears. French startups are deeply concerned about the outcome of the snap parliamentary election that President Emmanuel Macron called a couple weeks ago, Sifted reports.

It looks like the far-right RN party will win the most votes, which would likely increase French protectionism, decrease immigration, and drive away external investors. The other big force is a new left-wing coalition, known as the NFP, that could reverse Macron’s startup-friendly tax policies. For startups, it feels like a lose-lose situation. “[The election] has created an unprecedented risk that our country will be governed in the coming weeks by forces that offer withdrawal, shutting down and regression, or by forces that welcome confrontation, division and the radical transformation of our economy,” a recent startup open letter read.