Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd, coming to you with some not-so-great news. Add this video to our series of videos where we step by step cover the ongoing destruction of the Internet, or at least like anything that made the Internet good to begin with.

And while there are a lot of things that I like about the Internet and the way that it works today, especially in how quickly personal communications and video and information can be shared person to person, what I'm hating to see slowly die on the vine is the Internet's capacity to function as a conveniently searchable database for various bits of human history, culture, art, creativity.

Look, to cut to the chase, I've been on the internet for decades now at this point, and one of my favorite mainstays online for a long time has been the Internet Archive, which has long been a place where it's been very easy and convenient to access various types of media that may still be under commercial copyright of some sort, but for whatever reason, it's not available via streaming or it's out of print, it's not accessible through convenient means through which you would usually get a piece of media.

Historically, in the information age, the Internet Archive has been there to provide users and provide the audience with what sometimes copyright owners or commercial marketplaces on the Internet are not willing to offer. Truth be told, even though the Internet Archive is registered as a library and they are officially a nonprofit organization, the areas in which they operate have always been gray legally. Unfortunately, that is coming back around to bite the platform in the butt recently, in one instance, through a massive lawsuit with Hatchet Book Group Incorporated.

Now, to tie this into a musical thing, the Internet Archive is in the midst of a lawsuit that the major labels are throwing down at their feet. Maybe because they're seeing blood in the water over the Hatchet Book Group suit, which courts have not ruled in Internet Archive's favor in terms of their publishing and digital sharing of various books, qualifying as fair use.

For years now, Internet Archive has been engaged in a process that digitizes and disseminates and archives various music recordings that are just basically on old 78s, which honestly is a commendable effort for anybody who actually cares about art and music history. However, the thing is, while a lot of the music on those 78s is most definitely irrelevant and out of print and probably difficult to find just about anywhere, simultaneously, a good share of that music is actually by very popular artists who are quite marketable and continue to be industry cash cows through either album sales or streams or commercial use of those works in movies or television and the like. As a result, the labels are still very aggressive with their defense of their IP on those recordings.

According to a recent Rolling Stone piece covering this entire story, from front to back, this lawsuit is totaling up to hundreds of millions of dollars. And between this and the Hatchet suit, personally, I worry about the future of the Internet Archive.

I mean, maybe in some utilitarian scenario where the Archive lives to fight another day, the option could be explored to basically take down any and all materials that have the major labels going after them legally and just hope they send their lawyers back home and cease seeking any monetary very damages. But that's an outcome that would require these companies to be benevolent and understanding and maybe even forgiving when they've proven themselves to very much not be that time and time and time again.

Granted, as it is argued in this Rolling Stone piece, you could say that Internet Archive is operating with a bit of hubris here in that they feel entitled to some degree to house and share material onto the internet that is technically not theirs. But simultaneously, if they're not doing this, who's going to?

I mean, for sure, there are a wide variety of websites connected to libraries all across the country. You could even throw the Library of Congress into that bunch. But that's a pretty disconnected network at the end of the day. I don't believe in total that it measures up to the amount of archiving the Internet Archive has been able to do up until this point, which, mind you, also includes the wayback machine, which has been vital, essential, and fantastic when it comes to actually housing elements of how the Internet used to be and has been at various points over its lifetime.

Generally, when it comes to archiving and making note of and saving history, the companies that run the internet for the most part these days fucking suck it doing it. Not only are more and more reputable news sites going behind paywalls, these days, but their search functions often are not very good.

In addition to that, search engines year in and year out are getting worse and worse in terms of every search you punch in being flooded with sponsored pages, sponsored concert ads or AI bullshit that's not even correct a good deal of the time. But I mean, this is the inevitability of leaving it up to companies and capitalists to basically archive our history and our most significant information for us, as well as our art, our creativity, our media, our journalism. The only art, media, creativity, or history you're going to be exposed to is what's most profitable to expose you to at any given time.

And as a result of that very corrupt incentive, there should be a giant internet archive-sized website documenting all of this for people's convenience, and it should actually be government-backed and government-funded instead of, I don't know, just being left to die on the vine as it's being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. Because, again, search engines are getting more and more inconvenient to use. Social media sites never fucking mind in terms of keeping track of anything effectively or making it convenient for users to search through archives and cross-reference various posts and things.

I fear that if Internet Archive goes down, it's just going to make it even more difficult to use use the internet as something that you can actually go back into the past with, that you can use as a means of keeping track of the trajectory of history. Instead, every stupid fucking thing that you see thrown in front of your face is just going to be another annoying, ugly, live algorithm of whatever the latest bullshit is.

I like novelty. I like recency. I literally make a living off of reviewing new music. But little to none of that music means anything if you don't understand the greater context in which it exists. And if our ability to grasp that greater concept through the Internet is ripped away from us through lawsuits like these and through the destruction of sites like Internet Archive, the online world is going to be a very ugly and horrible place, uglier than it is right now.

I'm going to leave my thoughts there. Let me know yours down in the comments. I'm sure you will.

Anthony Fantano. Internet Archive. Forever.