Philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” With that being said, preserving and saving as much as we can will improve society as a whole – internet archives play an important role in this sentiment.

Last month, the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, lost a major appeal and court battle after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the organization in a case related to the digitization of books.

The lawsuit in question arose after publishers caught onto the Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library (NEL) program which came about after mass library closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With an unfortunate rise in textbook costs, book costs and rising prices as a whole, this court decision impacts everyone’s access to information. In particular, NEL allowed students to find textbooks and other literature at reduced, or no costs. Now, many disadvantaged students will have little to no help finding resources essential to their academic success.

Though the plaintiffs in the case argued that their copyright was being infringed upon, it should be noted that the Internet Archive, through its online lending system, only gave out the same amount of digital copies of its books as it had printed copies. By giving out the limited supplies of books for free NEL essentially functioned as a digital library, not the pirating scheme the court made it out to be.

Strangely enough, one of the books forcibly removed from the archive is George Orwell’s “1984.” Removing a piece of literature that is literally about erasing knowledge, is horrendous.

Likewise, another important topic regarding the internet archives, is that it is a free way for one to see how the internet has changed over the years. This is because the internet archive has saved nearly 900 billion web pages, many dating from the very early days of the web. These webpages can be viewed through the “Wayback Machine,” another program of the Internet Archives.

The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, is an archivist, not just of the internet. In a similar way to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Khale has meticulously archived over 500,000 books. He believes in the importance of people’s access to information.

Saving media of any type is important, in the same way, that our country saves our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Saving our founding documents is clearly important, but saving all the information generated in this country is just as important —- the information we generate constitutes our nation’s identity.

With these recent legal cases, the future of digital lending and archives will be in the air, and as such, many people around the country will lack access to not just information that interests them but important information as well.