News sites are blocking the Wayback Machine, and journalists are pushing back

In short: More major news websites are restricting the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to defend it.

What's going on

The Wayback Machine is a tool that saves copies of web pages over time, like a public library that keeps old newspapers. Reporters use it to see what a page said on a past date, even if it has changed or disappeared.

Some large publishers are blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving their sites. WIRED reports that USA Today’s parent company blocks the Internet Archive’s main web saving crawler (a program that visits pages and stores a copy). An analysis cited in the story says 23 major news sites are blocking that crawler, and Reddit is also blocking it.

Publishers say a key reason is concern about AI companies reusing archived material to train artificial intelligence systems without permission. The New York Times said it is worried its content on the Internet Archive is being used by AI companies in ways that violate copyright. The Guardian is not fully blocking the crawler, but it limits access through the Internet Archive’s API (a kind of doorway that lets other tools retrieve data) and also makes some archived articles harder to find.

What to watch

Journalists are starting to openly oppose this lockdown. Advocacy groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future gathered more than 100 journalist signatures supporting the Internet Archive, arguing it helps with accountability reporting and even legal evidence. The Internet Archive says it is in talks with some publishers, but if more outlets stay blocked, it could become much harder for the public to look up reliable records of what was published online.

Source: Wired