Nobody makes any money here, right?
So you do this for some other reason.
Why do you do it?
Ceramic sculptures of Internet Archive employees at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.Jason Scott/Courtesy of the Internet Archive
Because you want to be proud of what you do.
I ask what you have to do to earn a statue.
You have to spend your time doing a public service.
Oh, did I tell you?
he adds as a casual aside.
The major record labels are trying to destroy us.
To build universal access to all knowledge.
Its there to record and make available an accurate version of the past, Kahle says.
Otherwise, well end up with a George Orwell world where the past can be manipulated and erased.
It took nearly two decades during which the Archive occasionally faced smaller legal challenges but Lessig was right.
The publishers claimed mass, willful copyright infringement andwon a summary judgmentin the lower courts last March.
(The Archive appealed, butlost againearlier this month.)
(These recordings are now no longer available on the Great 78 Project, per Kahle.)
If the labels win, with a broad enough judgment, it could end the Internet Archive.
(The most recent action in the case was a private mediation session between the parties earlier this week.
Above the doorway to Kahles office is a street sign: Librarian Place.
Kahle was enamored with libraries, and they informed his two major contributions to the early internet era.
That was a game of very few winners, he likes to say.
He wanted to make a game with many.
How do we make it so its many-to-many-to-many, without any central points of control?
Kahle still got rich.
WAIS sold to AOL for $15 million in 1995.
This was how you got tight controls on information, locked up behind towering paywalls.
A game of few winners.
Weve taken the promise of the internet and shafted it, Kahle says.
We convinced people I was one of them to turn to their screens to answer questions.
So, as the internet zagged, Kahle took his millions and brilliance and built his bastion.
To grow the Internet Archive, that meant dancing around and prodding the limits of copyright law.
Though to the Archives detractors, this often looked like blatant disregard.
In reality, Defendants are nothing more than mass infringers.
Still, serving the public good seemed to earn the Archive some leeway.
Kahle shared a kind of copyright philosophy at a 2019 conference.
Try not to cause other people to feel like theyre being taken advantage of, he told the crowd.
If that doesnt happen, they wont come after you.
If they feel like theyre being taken advantage of, theyll throw things at you, like lawyers …
I think we just need to proceed and do the right thing.
Dont do things that smell bad.
But to many, the Internet Archive always smelled bad.
Instead, he settles on a fictional Latin legal descriptor: Habeas grabus.
In other words: I have it, I grab it.
Theyve really gotten under the skin of a lot of people, he adds.
And there are movements among rights holders to get tough on them.
Theres barely a factual dispute, Turkewitz argues.
Kinney agrees: They talk a great game.
But the reality is, Bing Crosbys White Christmas when do we not hear that?
I think thats a hard argument to make, she says.
I would be shocked if they hadnt gotten new copyright registrations for those recordings.
What theyre exploiting is a remastered version of the older recordings.
And what the Internet Archive is streaming are the original, very low-fi recordings.
A Victor Talking Machine from 1927 sits in between.
Kahle asks if Ive ever heard a 78 played on a mechanical phonograph before.
Im instructed to turn the crank on the side until it starts to resist.
After a stern piano intro, the bass and guitar swing into a lush, goofy, gimlet-drunk groove.
Ive stood in front of subwoofers as they huff and puff; Ive felt bass vibrating through my body.
But this is different, a breath out of the past.
Seventy-eights have long been essential, if not invaluable, to the preservation of early-20th-century sound.
But few of those metal plates survive today.
Lew Tucker, a computer scientist and peer of Kahles, understands the repercussions of those considerations.
Theres no commercial interest, Tucker admits of his dads music.
But then its all locked up, nobody can hear it.
Brewsters not monetizing it.
The Great 78 Project was ultimately designed for the Tommy Tuckers and the Concerto Boogies.
Its the long tail that people wanted, says Kahle.
They wanted to know, What did America sound like?
Were looking for not only the things people listened to, but the way they listened to it.
And the Internet Archive probably couldve done exactly this and never faced a $621 million lawsuit.
No such request came, just the lawsuit three years later.
Were similar steps taken for the 78s?
For LPs and CDs, thats exactly what we do, he says.
There wasnt any concern about even a Sinatra hit on 78?
For a few moments, its just the hearty horns of Bob Haggart and His Orchestra.
It wasnt a problem, Kahle says after a beat.
We talked to people, it wasnt a problem.
People go to Spotify to find things that they enjoy [listening to].
If you want to enjoy [the sound of] 78s, get this, he insists.
Well, do people?
This question feels pertinent in a $621 million lawsuit.
And the complaint does throw out some statistics estimated play counts and downloads for a few recordings.
Im not gonna say no to that I tried not to mess it up!
Theyre still regularly licensed for video games, movies, and TV shows, too.
People are more aware of it than they know, says Mills.
Mills, like other estate reps I spoke to, stands firmly with the labels.
It is a treasure trove, in essence, Mills acknowledges of the Great 78 Project.
But the same could arguably be said of record labels.
This is how the record industry has functioned since forever.
Thelonious Monk was ripped off, Holloway says.
Let me be frank about it.
Anything that reduces the income to the estate is wrong.
I dont see the Great 78 Project taking any of that money out of any performers pocket.
For someone like Mills, these contradictions are deeply personal.
These guys worked, he says of the Mills Brothers.
But Mills also recognizes that those returns have been stymied by forces far greater than the Internet Archive.
Hes part of ongoing litigation against Universal accusing the label of withholding royalties for legacy artists and their estates.
(Universal has denied the claims and settled with some of the plaintiffs.)
Mills talks with passion and reverence about his family, but its tangled up in years of frustration.
And with years of frustration comes years of pain.
Its like pulling scabs all the time, he says.
And I dont want to hurt like that.
Why Are They Trying to Erase Us?
How has the Internet Archive with its ever-growing collection contended with this question?
Ever the evangelist, Kahle replies that technology has made it moot.
Weve been able to build a library not only of famous people, but little people, he says.
Thats whats going to be destroyed by these corporations the history of much more common people.
Its obvious theyre not doing any harm!
Why are they doing this?
Kahle often returns to this question ofwhy?
Without us, people wouldnt have a record, Kahle says.
So why are they trying to erase us?
She then adds with a perceptive laugh, But thats not really how business is done.
And really, its business all the way down.
No mention was made of how much money ifany authors would see.
At the Internet Archive, Kahle and others are still trying to build the future he always envisioned.
This place is kind of the soul of the internet, says one team member.
Its not the Internet Archive its hundreds of collectors and institutions, all working together.
