This is just a short opinion post from the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive but the story it references is a significant development: "some major news organizations - including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit - are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine." They're doing it of course because they can't collect money from AI companies if those companies think they can just get the content from Wayback. Mark Graham argues that "the Wayback Machine is built for human readers. We use rate limiting, filtering, and monitoring to prevent abusive access." But of course this might not always be the case, so the content companies are protecting their turf. But in the long term, protecting their turf may cause more harm than good: "significant chunks of our journalistic record and historical cultural context simply... disappear."
Today: Total: [Direct link] [Share]
