IT HAS been said that one of the great losses of the ancient world was the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. It housed some of the literate world’s great documents, estimated to have been around 400,000 scrolls at its height. Then Julius Caesar lit Alexandria on fire in 48 BC and the library burned to the ground.

One of the great treasures of the contemporary world is an online library called the Internet Archive (IA). Established in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, a US digital librarian, computer engineer from MIT, and advocate of universal access to all knowledge.

This makes him a champion of the commons. And the public online library he has built is a wonder of the modern world. As of September 5 2024, the Internet Archive held over 866 billion web pages, more than 42.5 million print materials, 13 million videos, 3 million TV news, 1.2 million software programmes, 14 million audio files, 5 million images, and 272,660 concerts in its Wayback Machine.

In his IA blog, Brewster Kahle tells the reader in a headline to one post: “I set out to build the next Library of Alexandria. Now I wonder: will there be libraries in 25 years?”

He writes in the blog, “But just as the web increased people’s access to information exponentially, an opposite trend has evolved. Global media corporations — emboldened by the expansive copyright laws they helped craft and the emerging technology that reaches right into our reading devices — are exerting absolute control over digital information.”

The archive has tremendous collections you would never find anywhere else. You will find unusual and still useful relics of the 1960s counterculture, such as literary magazines like “F*ck You,” a stapled mimeograph publication that featured the likes of Anne Waldman, James Tate, Leroi Jones, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski (still downloadable).

You can browse through their growing live music archive, movie collection (83,000 films), vintage software, a digital collection of 78 rpm singles — it goes on and on. Real treasures preserved.

The Wayback Machine is an archive of web pages scraped and saved by the IA to preserve snapshots of how websites have changed over time, including those which have come and gone. It is also a journalist’s boon, as one could check out websites no longer existing that once had potentially potent political information.

The Wayback Machine is derived from the classic cartoon, Mr Peabody and Sherman. One can see how it could be used for subversive, if creative purposes. What they tell you, and then you go back — way back — to discover for yourself. Someone put up a Youtube video that is helpful in explaining how the machine could be employed — see www.bit.ly/wayback1953.

I used the Wayback Machine when I researched the alleged infiltrations of the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal in 2012, which was investigated by two major cybersecurity firms, Mandiant and Crowdstrike, ostensibly competitors.

I discovered that the heads of each company, Kevin Mandia and George Kurz, once worked together at a company (Foundstone) that went under after allegations of intellectual property theft were published by Fortune Magazine. This raised questions of integrity about the media breaches.

But the thing I like best about the IA is the facility to download e-books in a borrowing situation. You have to download Adobe Digital Edition (ADE) first and then import a selected book from IA into ADE.

Just as with any library, you had access to that book for a fixed time, in this case two weeks, after which access would expire, making the book available for others to borrow. If no-one else was waiting to borrow then you could take it out again, just as at a walk-in library. Things were going along swimmingly, as they say, the IA was (I swear) getting better by the day.

Then, suddenly, it started to go bad for Brewster. He started getting indications that allowing individuals to download books (especially) amounted to copyright infringement, according to several publishers, most notably Hachette, who sued to stop the excess fun at IA.

The ADE system of borrowing digital books did not suit the greedy publishers at all. Suddenly, when a would-be borrower went to the IA site books in the library would be unavailable for borrowing either by download or online. This turned out to be because most of the books were now unavailable.

The IA disagreed with Hachette’s argument: “The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support CDL are simply striving to serve their patrons effectively and efficiently, lending books one at a time, just as they have done for centuries. Copyright law does not prevent that lawful fair use. Indeed, it supports it.”

This interruption bothered me a lot. I had previously been outraged when the IA was forced to take down copies of NSA/CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, which detailed how the US government, colluding with other governments, including Britain, has set out to keep electronic tabs on everyone on the planet.

Then the Wayback Machine was unavailable. And then there was a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the IA site that took it down for a few days. It was clear that someone just wanted the modern day Library of Alexandria to go away. But it wasn’t going anywhere.

The government had seized the book’s profits, making further distribution unlikely, and now someone had told IA to pull it and it fell off the IA site. As if to make a subtle political jab, IA left posted the Chinese version of Permanent Record (this version was heavily censored).

The non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation is defending the Internet Archive and has gone to court to stop Hachette and other publishers from destroying the open access of information provided by the IA. A pamphlet was put out by the IA, Vanishing Culture, that spelled out what was at stake to the public:

“While the Internet Archive has experienced threats before, this attack underscores a new and alarming trend — cyberattacks on libraries and memory institutions … Each incident presents a unique danger to the digital infrastructure preserving our culture.

“These threats are evolving — not just blocking access, but threatening the very systems that secure the preservation of knowledge — which highlights a new frontier in the battle for cultural preservation.”

The IA sees culture as a common, shared space, while Hachette and others see culture as a place of privilege, marked by private ownership. Those who care about the dwindling commons should care and help fight back. As the old Paul Simon song goes, preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.

John Hawkins is a writer of journalism, fiction and poetry. He also blogs at Tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com.