The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org.

[2][3][4] It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials.

[18][20] On November 6, 2013, the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco's Richmond District caught fire,[21] destroying equipment and damaging some nearby apartments.

The announcement received widespread coverage due to the implication that the decision to build a backup archive in a foreign country was because of the upcoming presidency of Donald Trump.

[38] On June 1, 2020, four large publishing houses – Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and John Wiley – filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, claiming that the Internet Archive's practice of controlled digital lending constituted copyright infringement.

[citation needed] On October 23, archive.org, the Wayback Machine, Archive-It, and the Open Library services all resumed but with some features, such as logging in, still unavailable until the staff announced it back available in the next day or two.

In 2019, it had an annual budget of $37 million, derived from revenue from its Web crawling services, various partnerships, grants, donations, and the Kahle-Austin Foundation.

To reduce the risk of data loss, the Archive creates copies of parts of its collection at more distant locations, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina[70][71] in Egypt and a facility in Amsterdam.

The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest open access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

[116][117] The Library of Congress created numerous Handle System identifiers that pointed to free digitized books in the Internet Archive.

The sub-collection is a collaborative effort among the Internet Archive, the How They Got Game research project at Stanford University, the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, and Machinima.com.

This collection contains hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China.

[152] Since December 23, 2014, the Internet Archive presents, via a browser-based DOSBox emulation, thousands of DOS/PC games[153][154][155][156] for "scholarship and research purposes only".

It aims to foster collaboration, learning, and fun while promoting principles of trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness.

[166] On September 30, 2021, as a part of its 25th anniversary celebration, Internet Archive launched the "Wayforward Machine", a satirical, fictional website covered with pop-ups asking for personal information.

The site was intended to depict a fictional dystopian timeline of real-world events leading to such a future, such as the repeal of Section 230 of the United States Code in 2022 and the introduction of advertising implants in 2041.

This collection, inspired by the statues of the Xian warriors in China, was commissioned by Brewster Kahle, sculpted by Nuala Creed, and as of 2014, is ongoing.

During this one-year residency, selected artists develop a body of work that responds to and utilizes the Archive's collections in their own practice.

On May 8, 2008, it was revealed that the Internet Archive had successfully challenged an FBI national security letter asking for logs on an undisclosed user.

[177] The Internet Archive blacked out its web site for 12 hours on January 18, 2012, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act bills, two pieces of legislation in the United States Congress that they argued would "negatively affect the ecosystem of web publishing that led to the emergence of the Internet Archive".

[180][181] Because the Internet Archive only lightly moderates uploads, it includes resources that may be valued by extremists and the site may be used by them to evade block listing.

[183] In April 2019, Europol, acting on a referral from French police, asked the Internet Archive to remove 550 sites of "terrorist propaganda".

[190] At launch, the Internet Archive allowed authors and rightholders to submit opt-out requests for their works to be omitted from the National Emergency Library.

[191][195] The Archive had already been criticized by authors and publishers for its prior lending approach, and upon announcement of the National Emergency Library, authors, publishers, and groups representing both took further issue with The Archive and its Open Library project, equating the move to copyright infringement and digital piracy, and using the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to push the boundaries of copyright.

John Perry Barlow identified Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann as the instigators of the change, according to an article in The New York Times.

[200] Phil Lesh, a founding member of the band, commented on the change in a November 30, 2005, posting to his personal web site: It was brought to my attention that all of the Grateful Dead shows were taken down from Archive.org right before Thanksgiving.

[206] The Internet Archive then stated, on January 27, that they had removed the video in response to a BBC request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

[209] The operation of the National Emergency Library was part of a lawsuit filed against the Internet Archive by four major book publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—in June 2020, challenging the copyright validity of the controlled digital lending program.

[226] The Internet Archive has argued that the primitive sound quality of the original recordings falls within the doctrine of "fair use" to digitize for preservation, that the number of downloads is so small it has almost no impact on the publishers' revenue, and over 95% of the collection is not readily available anywhere else.

"[227] According to a legal source at Mayer Brown, the music publishers' case could be challenged as unconstitutional, since the granting of copyright to pre-1972 works in the MMA only benefitted record companies without having a systemic effect.