What's happening there?

Yeah, we are collateral damage in the AI wars.

So there are publishers, this has come out in a couple of different news articles, that publishers like The New York Times, The Guardian, even media organizations like Reddit are blocking the WayBack Machine so that we can't index the content.

And there are also efforts afoot to block access to the content that has already been recorded over this, uh, period of time from individual publishers and rights holders.

Now, the Internet Archive goes along with the wishes of the rights holders, and so if someone reaches out, a- an organization reaches out to us or an individual reaches out and says, "I don't want my website in there," for whatever reason, we will go with their wishes and no longer make that content available.

But we really try, especially with media organizations, we try to talk with them and say like, "Think about this.

Are you sure that you want to remove your content from the record?" We've heard, and it has been printed in these articles, that the reasons for the, for the publishers withdrawing from the WayBack Machine is that they're worried about the WayBack Machine being a backdoor to AI scraping But that is completely unfounded.

Does AI have access to the Internet Archive? Like, if I'm working on something with Claude, can it consult the Internet Archive to give me an answer?

But that's what we work towards.

I think this topic has always intrigued me.

So as a librarian, as a, you know, growing up as a amateur hoarder, it blows my mind when it blew my mind when Snapchat came along, like the very idea that you are intentionally creating content that is designed to dissolve and to not be there.

I just didn't understand it.

Everything that I've done, all the pictures that I've taken that I still have on my external drives that I'm carrying forward into the cloud, it's all there.

I'm creating this stuff with the intention of it sticking around, not the intention of it disappearing and dissolving in front of my very eyes or the eyes of the person who I have sent this content to.

And so I just think it's funny that there has been this change of like, oh, we've got to create this, we've got to, and hold onto it to, nah, let's create it and throw it away immediately.

Chris, maybe you want to mention just just one or two of the instances that your contributors have written about in this report before we get to what I want to close out with here, which is what do we do? How do we make this better? What are the legislative fixes, etc.?