Strengthening the Internet Archive

Whenever I demonstrate the Internet ArchiveAlthough even the Archive has to be alive to its legal obligations on privacy and confidentiality – see Complainant E v Statutory Entity [2003] VPrivCmr 5 (31 October 2003) – or Wayback Machine – you can see the lightbulbs go off, as people recognize just how useful it can be to go back in time to see what was on a page a while ago.

The life of the average website is around a hundred days.

The best discussion of how legal researchers can use it is at LLRX.

For a general discussion see an AP wire story – Archive.org: Where Old Web Sites Go to Die

Last week, the Internet Archive won an exemption from US copyright law, overcoming an obstacle which threatened the entire work of the not-for-profit group. It can display copies of obsolete computer games and software without fear of prosecution.

There’s an interesting podcast about the challenges of storage when you’re dealing with petabytes of data, and a more conventional article, entitled Internet Archive Tames Data Costs. The Archive database has more than a petabyte of data, which includes 60 billion Web pages, 45,000 recorded concerts, 45,000 films and video recordings, educational courseware and more than 100,000 audio recordings.