Now that the December 3rd deadline has passed for Internet Archive to file for cert with the Supreme Court, the copyright case litigated by book publishers Hachette et al. is closed. The Second Circuit decision will stand, finding that IA’s legal theories were without merit—theories I have discussed in multiple posts and will not rehash again here. I have also compared the hubris of IA founder Brewster Kahle to Icarus et al. in context to the question of whether his anti-copyright agenda may be fatal to the archive itself. As such, there is little to add now that the Hachette case is concluded, but perhaps there is still value in IA as a cautionary tale at this moment in our political history.
There has been a lot of chatter asking why Silicon Valley pivoted away from progressives and toward the political right, but the question doesn’t resonate because, by my lights, the far right and far left want the same thing—to overwrite American institutions—and Silicon Valley has been happy to let both sides move fast and break as much as possible. It was clear more than a decade ago that the Left and Libertarian perception of Big Tech as Robin Hood (even if he was driving a Maserati) was about more than the rhetoric of providing access to “content” being kept from the public by “gatekeepers” and “rent seekers.”
Whether that message came from Google executives, the EFF, academia, or Kahle, it was the same nonsense wrapped in alternating red or blue packages appealing to one political sensibility or the other. In other words, the progressive-sounding rhetoric supporting IA’s anti-copyright agenda may not be uttered by oligarchs themselves, but the view is conducive to oligarchy the same way that bolshevism and fascism start out walking in opposite directions but wind up in the same place. Kahle’s presuming to arrogate an author’s rights to his organization to fulfill his personal utopian idea is barely more tolerable than the arrogance of Musk or Andreesen.
Like the erroneous litany on which Andreesen based the Techno Optimist Manifesto, Kahle’s vision of an Alexandrian Library in the cloud has been promoted on the false premises that society suffers from inadequate access to information and cultural works and that copyright is the cause. The complaint that copyright rights “lock up” works is a narrative invented by Silicon Valley as a mask for its predatory business practices, and the fact that Kahle et al. express the same fallacy from the perspective of librarians does not alter the harmful nature of the idea itself.
If Internet Archive were a for-profit business with executives pulling down Facebook, Spotify, or Google salaries, sympathy for its “cause” would find fewer fans on the Left. Therein lies the lesson about tech-utopians: whether they appeal to “progressives” or “conservatives,” they’re all preaching the same arrogant gospel that individual rights are a nuisance because they know best how the world should work.
Image: Phaeton, from “The Four Disgracers” Hendrick Goltzius Netherlandish After Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem Netherlandish
