“This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”
You know what is so ironic? I remember not that long ago (OK, like 20 years ago…) that once something was on the internet, it is there forever as long as file sharing and multiple hosts do it… but it has become abundantly clearly that, despite the fact that it can be REALLY hard to get shit off the internet, it doesn’t make it impossible. We’ve already seen it happen. The truth is, there is so much stuff that people DON’T widely share, and even then, the interest in their sharing in a torrent style is limited (I once downloaded leaked emails regarding transphobic propagandists talking to one another and while I kept seeding for almost a year, I barely got anyone downloading), that it is actually possible to make large amounts of stuff just vanish.
I think the real point of the adage, “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is more about the fact that you, personally, can’t take it back. Someone might of screenshot, downloaded it, reuploaded it elsewhere. The real meaning being that, once it’s on the internet, you no longer control it. Which I think still holds true, but it definitely was heavily implied that it would be there forever.
Yes, the trouble with archiving is knowing what will be important in the future, rather than just popular now. We saved a lot of games from the 80’s through 2000’s through piracy, because they were popular to pass around, but we lost a most of the early web because no one thought it would disappear until the internet archive came along.
Piracy is the reason why video games survived what I call ‘the early creation purge’. Basically if you look at the 20th century and see various media that was created, most of the early stuff is gone. Like in the silent film era, 90% of all the films made (if we are using Hollywood movies as a metric) are lost, and probably also the film of other countries, too. Even 75% of all early sound film is lost, and for TV, the earliest broadcasts were never recorded, and many from the 1940s to 60s were also never recorded and are lost forever.
Video games? They’re the sole exception. Thanks to piracy and emulation, we can play computer and arcade and console games from the 1970s without issue. This has never happened before, and we have emulation devs and software pirates to thank. Ironically the overwhelming majority of abandonware video games online were not the originals… they were copies of copies that someone not only pirated back in the day, but also cracked. As a 90s kid, I smile whenever I see the RawCopy screen when I load up an old MS-DOS game.
Archive.org is doing God’s work for a lot of stuff.
Not just games. Full operating systems from the 60s and 70s are being kept alive by hobbyists. Unfortunately there is no law or rule about proprietary/company specific software. In 50 years (or less) historians will know more about how the Romans did banking than how it was done in the early days of computing.