A constant hum drones out of a former church in San Francisco. It is the sound, from hundreds of fans cooling hundreds of computer servers, of the digital past being kept alive. This is the Internet Archive, the largest collection of archived web pages in the world and a constant reminder of the fragility of our digital past. It is also, thanks to a March ruling in a federal court, which found that the archive’s lending practices violate publishers’ rights, just one battlefield in a growing struggle that will define how humanity’s collective digital memory is owned, shared and preserved — or lost forever.
As a scholar of digital data, I know that not all data loss — the corrosion and destruction of our digital past — is tragic. But much data loss today occurs in ways that are deeply unjust and that have monumental implications for both culture and politics. Few nonprofit…
