Blog

Here’s Max Collins, lead singer of legendary alt-rock band Eve 6, reading a book that he owns. As you know, the Internet Archive is currently being sued by four corporate publishers. The publishers want to stop libraries from owning books. In the age of Netflix and Spotify, ownership of culture is increasingly in the hands of large corporations rather than … Read more

We are excited to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded nearly $50,000 through its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program to UC Berkeley Library and Internet Archive to study legal and ethical issues in cross-border text data mining research. NEH funding for the project, entitled Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining – Cross Border (LLTDM-X), will support research … Read more

Over the last few years we have seen many new characters enter the public domain including Winnie-the-Pooh in 2022, Mickey Mouse in 2024, and now, Popeye in 2025! The character emerged from a comic strip called Thimble Theater, which was started in 1919 and originally centered around the characters Ham Gravy and Olive Oyl. Popeye made … Read more

Join experts from the library, copyright, and information policy fields for a series of conversations exploring issues related to digital ownership and the future of library collections. Learn more about the event on the Library Leaders Forum web site, or register below. This year’s Library Leaders Forum will be organized on two separate dates to provide attendees with a … Read more

The following guest post from curator and amateur radio enthusiast Kay Savetz is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now. Amateur Radio has been a hobby for well over 100 years. For as long as there has been an understanding of electricity and … Read more

Disney’s classic animated short, “The Skeleton Dance,” is now in the public domain (Duke Law). Why is that such a big deal? Watch as Internet Archive’s Sean Dudley, a researcher specializing in the public domain, takes viewers on a tour of what makes “The Skeleton Dance” special, and why the film being open to remix … Read more

A discussion session from DWeb Camp 2019 led by Fellows. How do we ensure that the decentralized web fulfills its potential to create a better web for all? That the technologies, organizations, and approaches that gain traction and succeed (by any measure) uphold the security, privacy, and self-determination of everyone, especially those of marginalized populations … Read more

“Josh Chin and Liza Lin have given us a truly groundbreaking investigation of China’s embrace of digital surveillance. The global scope and deep detail of their account retires the notion of an ‘all-seeing’ surveillance as some future scenario; it is happening already. They will open your eyes to the astonishing intersection of data, politics, and … Read more

Bill Delzell is trying to track down who took thousands of high-quality photos in the late 1960s in San Francisco and left the vast collection abandoned in a storage unit. The images include protests of the Vietnam War, the music scene with Jerry Garcia, and young people gathered in Golden Gate Park for the Human … Read more

“A beautifully illustrated journey through the history of computing, from the Antikythera mechanism to the iPhone and beyond—I loved it.”—Eben Upton, Founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi From notched bones in the ancient world to self-driving cars powered by modern AI, for centuries humans have used computing systems to solve problems & enhance the way … Read more