A Timeline of The National Emergency Library Controversy

This is a problem. IA is not only the best means we have of preserving the internet through the Wayback Machine, it also houses books (the reason it’s getting sued in the first place), classic (and by that I mean DOS) video games, and oh yeah, all of our annotation data. Losing this site would be very, very bad.

So what’s the lawsuit about? Basically, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley are trying to say that the Internet Archive is piracy, plain and simple. They say that IA does not deserve to call itself a library, which according to the state of California, it is. And basically, that IA does not deserve to exist. Thanks, publishers.

Giving the document a careful look through, a couple of things strike me as curious. One, the lawsuit mentions five people also being sued despite the publishers not actually knowing who they are. Good one. They also insist on referring to it as a “library”, air quotes included, rather than an archive. And as I mentioned before, according to California, it is a library.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get any word about this from the Archive’s point of view, either due to an unknown gag order or just fear for its safety.

– glmdgrielson, writing his second article on the new site