You can watch it here. Includes short documentaries about her from 1974 and 1999. (Last screenshot is of a video montage from her 1993 Chelsea Hotel documentary.)
Big Media’s lobbyists have been running a smear campaign trying to paint the Internet Archive as a greedy big tech operation bent on stealing books—which is totally absurd. If you’ve ever used the WayBack Machine, listened to their wonderful archives of live music, or checked out one of their 37 million texts, it’s time to speak up. On March 20, everyone is showing their support for the Internet Archive during oral arguments.
The Internet Archive is our library, a massive collection of knowledge and culture accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Don’t let greedy publishers burn down the next Library of Alexandria!
And if you’re absolutely certain you don’t use or need the Internet Archive, take a look at their projects first, you might be surprised. Those are all at risk too.
The Archive is so, so, so important to me, to my largest passion (retro game preservation), and to humanity as a whole so we don’t lose our history and media to time.
If you’ve never heard of archive.org before, please check this out.
(Image from 1986 DisplayWrite manual. Found on IA.)
I don’t know who needs the reminder, but Open Library by the Internet
Archive is such a perfect way to read a ton of different books, and especially books that you will no longer find except for second-hand sale at exorbitant prices. My
experience so far is that you get to check out a book one hour at a time, and if there aren’t any holds on the book then you can just check it out again. You can also add yourself to the waitlist if there is a queue but older books are unlikely to have anyone waiting for them.
So, you know, like a library but with a lot more shelf space for everything from popular books to the most obscure and random stuff across the entirety of human history.
They’re always being unfairly harangued by book publishers for doing what any other library does, so if you like their work you can also donate to help them in their efforts to keep so many different forms of media available for free to the public.
If you can, please donate to the Internet archive, links in the description. The loss of the archive would be devastating for dozens of reasons.
I know the Library of Alexandria comment sounds like an exaggeration. It absolutely is not. As of May 7, 2022, the Internet Archive holds over 35 million books and texts, 7.9 million movies, videos and TV shows, 842 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips, 237 thousand concerts, and over 682 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine. It’s been operating since 1996, the loss of knowledge would be impossible to ever completely come back from.
The lawsuit from Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley Sons, and Penguin Random House alleges there have been significant revenue losses because of their controlled digital lending program. For context, most libraries in the US also use CDL to distribute books to their patrons wherever they are but those programs are run through for profit companies and the libraries are often paying a very high fee to so their patrons can have access to digital books. The Internet Archive’s program is completely free but they have a policy of not digitizing and lending anything less than 5 years old.
The lawsuit goes on to note that authors often own larger shares of their revenue of digital vs. print copies of their books. So the publishing companies, seeing that they’re underpaying their authors, are essentially blaming a library for being free instead of bumping up what authors earn on print copies. The Internet Archive’s 5 year policy is designed to protect authors anyway as that’s when books typically make the most money.
Hey by the way The Internet Archive is also one of the most cited places on Wikipedia. If it goes down a good chunk of Wikipedia will go back to “citation needed” or citations will lead to dead links.
ALT