“The Internet Archive is a library!” A lawsuit threatens the largest specialized library.

 The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library in San Francisco, has become one of the most important cultural institutions of our time. What began in 1996 as a bold attempt to archive the World Wide Web turned into a great library of books, music recordings, and television shows, digitized and available online, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge”.

 Now the final stage of a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for of copyright infringement filed by four of the world’s largest commercial publishers, who have been trying to shut down the archive’s core programs since the start of the pandemic, is in progress.

 The Internet Archive also includes Way back Machine – a service that archives billions of web pages from around the world. His other, lesser-known collections include 41 million digitized books and texts. The Internet Archive uses a practice known as “controlled digital lending,” where a library owns a book, digitizes it, and lends the physical book or its digital copy to one user at a time.