Blocking the Internet Archive Threatens Preservation of Online History

The Internet Archive, home to the Wayback Machine, has been preserving the web since the mid-1990s, providing journalists, researchers, and the public access to historical snapshots of websites. Recently, major publishers, including The New York Times and The Guardian, have begun blocking the Archive from crawling their sites, citing concerns over AI companies scraping news content for model training. While copyright disputes with AI companies continue, experts argue that nonprofit archives like the Internet Archive are not commercial AI actors but rather preserve the web’s historical record. Blocking such archives risks erasing decades of online history, including original versions of news articles that are later edited or removed. Courts have previously upheld that making content searchable, as Google did with books, constitutes fair use—a principle that also applies to archives. Wikipedia alone links to millions of articles preserved by the Archive. The article stresses that sacrificing public historical records to address AI copyright disputes is misguided and potentially irreversible, highlighting the importance of protecting archives alongside addressing AI-related legal issues.