Blog

Bob Lardine (1924-2019) asked great questions. As an interviewer, he knew how to keep things light, conversational. He got the information he needed, and wrote articles based on what answers the subject provided, but he did it in a way that never felt like he was prodding, or intending to catch someone out. He held a … Read more

How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone? The Internet Archive, Library Futures Foundation, and Creative Commons invite you to join us for a virtual book talk with Peter B. Kaufman, about his book The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge. Peter is joined by Catherine Stihler, CEO of Creative Commons, … Read more

This is the third in a series of guest blog posts exploring the real-world implications of the Decentralized Web Principles. By Kelsey Breseman Kelsey Breseman is a Rita Allen Civic Science Fellow at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, where she works on environmental accountability, data ownership models, and intentional community. Kelsey has founded and managed tech startups, … Read more

Registration is now open for the Library Leaders Forum 2021, our annual gathering of experts from the library, copyright, and information policy fields. Following the success of last year’s virtual Forum, which brought together hundreds of attendees from all over the world, we will again host a series of online workshops, presentations, and discussion sessions over … Read more

With the Canadian federal election coming to its conclusion, many eyes are turning to the last government’s proposals for internet and copyright policy reform. Unfortunately, some of these were quite concerning, such as an “online harms” proposal that the Electronic Frontier Foundation called “dangerously misguided“; all Canadians should learn more about this proposal and use Open Media’s tool to let the government … Read more

As many iconic works have entered into the public domain since 2019, there has been a surge of horror film adaptations. These horror adaptations have received strong critiques for their deviation from or failure to say something unique about their source material. Ultimately, this criticism has spilled over into skepticism about the public domain itself, framing … Read more

Yesterday, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) sent an inquiry to each of the “Big Five” book publishers to investigate their activities in the library e-book market. As the Senator and Congresswoman noted, rather than simply selling books to libraries, publishers insist on using “restrictive and expensive licensing agreements,” leaving libraries to face with “skyrocket[ing]” … Read more

It is an unfortunate truth that libraries have long been called upon to censor or destroy knowledge—a topic we recently explored with Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Indeed, Richard Ovenden has argued that, by standing against such attempts, libraries perform an essential function in support of democracy, the … Read more

Let’s welcome Eseohe “Ese” Ojo to the Decentralized Web community! We’re thrilled to have Ese (pronounced “essay”, she/her) as the new DWeb Projects Organizer. She will be working to foster dialogue and build networks among those building a web that is more private, reliable, secure and open. She will also help steward the DWeb website as a resource hub … Read more

We are excited to announce a new version of GifCities, Internet Archive’s GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine!  GifCities was a special project of Internet Archive originally done as part of our 20th Anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the Wayback Machine. Since then, GifCities GIFs … Read more