The Internet Archive Sued
In 2020 The Internet Archive was sued by Willey (one of the biggest textbook publishers), Penguin Random House (parent company of Penguin House), Hatchette Book Group (the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world), and HarperCollins, because of the former's new project "The Emergency Libary". In August 2023, UMG, Sony, and several other big record labels sued the Internet Archive for the "Great 78" project.
The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle with the goal of arhiving our history, culture, and artifacts, though primarily focusing on The Internet. You might be best familiar with their project, The Wayback Machine, which aims to preseve web pages in case their content changes or they become defunct. According to their website:
Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.
Such a function is obviously vital for the continuous functioning of our internet. Many websites provide links to external ones, which are now defunct, court cases cite Internet sources, which are gone, and media platforms constantly change their appearance, which may result in loss of context for future viewers. In a highly dynamic and heterogenous environment such as the Internet, an archival body, impartial and open to everyone, provides higher utility than the potential drawback of duplicate of information.
As of 2021, the Internet Archive stores more than 212 petabytes of data [4]. 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. 1 Terabyte is 1024 Gigabytes. 1 Petabyte is 1024 Terabytes.