should be back in circulation as a way of checking yourself to say who am i to cancel this person when i know that i that in the grand scheme of things, i'm just someone with an opinion that might ultimately be wrong. the is the canceling of the american mind. the authors greg lukianoff on off and ricky slide. greg, thank y

on about books. we delve into the latest news about the publishing industry with interesting insider interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and books. the latest book reviews. and we'll talk about the current non-food auction books featured copyright case.k and now we want to introduce you

to brewster kael. he is the founder of something you might be familiar with. it's called the internet archive. mr. kael, what is the purpose of the internet archive? the internet archive is a nonprofit research library largely used over the internet by people trying to dive deeper into wikipedia articles by clicking through on the citation, signs on the bottom and finding themselves on web pages that it might have been disappeared or on books. right at the right page to be able to follow up and learn more. how many unique visitors do you have a day or per year? per day? we get about 2 million people coming to the website, but about 5 million come and use the internet archive's resource in one way or another. it's about a between the 200th and most or 300th most popular website. so people actually want a library. and is it free? yes, everything is free on the internet archive. we collect web pages, books,

music, video. and the idea is that this is free public access. and yes, you can borrow books. you can look at all web pages. it's a it's a library. so when you founded this in 1996, what was your thought behind it? the idea is to build universal access to all knowledge. could we go and make the digital library of alexandria? right. could we actually make it so that people that are curious enough to want to have access to the published works of humankind, they could get access to it. that was the promise. when i was growing up, you walked into a library and they said, we have everything, and if we don't have it here, we'll get it for you. that was the promise of the internet that i signed on to in 1980 to try to help build the internet into that. by 96, it was time to build the library and so we've been building this library for the last 27 years. well, there was a recent headline on a website called the

conversation. it says that the internet archive's digital library has been found in breach of copyright. what is this about? so what happened is we've been with about a hundred other libraries directly and a couple of hundred other libraries have been lending digital ized books since 2011. so we we try to buy e-books, but it turns out that the big publishers will not sell e-books, which is really strange. we should go back into that. but because they will not sell e-books to libraries, we're taking the physical books that we have digitize using them often from the 20th century, long out of print, and we lend them to one reader at a time. so it's 26 possible readers a year for one of the books that we own. and suddenly this became a big trauma for the publishers in the early pandemic.

the idea that people would be able to check out art and 26 readers could see a particular book in a year and this they sued the internet archive. and at the district court level in new york, where they brought this, even though we're in calif, you don't have anything to do with new york. the the district court judge said that this is not right for us to do for books that are in publishers e-book collections that are licensed to libraries. well, mr. kail, there's a couple of things we want to break down there. first of all, why won't why can't you get an e-book copy, a digitized copy of a book from a publisher? the internet archive for years and years has been trying to buy e-books. they buy them in the same sense that we would own a physical book. right. what libraries do is they buy

preserve and lend. that's what they do. and the publishers are saying in the electronic world, you cannot buy an e-book, you cannot preserve an e-book, and you cannot lend an e-book that all of that is going to be controlled by them and under their terms. so they won't allow you to buy and and they can take away or change electronic books at any time. so what happens if you go to your public library and you think you're borrowing a book from your public library, an e-book? actually, what they're doing is shunting you to their database at the publisher or overdrive, which is controlled by the publishers, and they get all the surveillance information about who's reading what and on and what page and all of that. that is not in the tradition of library practices. so we've tried to buy e-books. there are a few small publishers that will sell e-books, but very few. so basically of the big libraries, they own nothing in

the digital age. and that is atrocious. so that's why we've had to go and do the awkward thing of acquiring physical books, storing those permanently. so we have a physical book that isn't circulating. digitize it and lend it one reader at a time, using the same protections that the publishers use for their imprint works for a dusty, musty old, sort of not very good scans. but this turns out to be extreme. only useful to wikipedia users that want to go and do a fact check. what we find is people use these books for about 30 seconds to a minute. couple of minutes. mostly, they basically go to a page, check it out, and then they're done with it. it's like being standing next to a stacks in a library. that's what we're for. that's what we are as a research library. it's not for beach reading, but this is was what the publishers decided to make a massive lawsuit, three years and counting.

now it's being appealed. it's extremely expensive to come up against billion dollar corporations as a nonprofit research library. how do you digitize the books? what's the process? we acquire the books we own on them. if it's a modern book, make sure that we don't have it already. right. so we try to basically just do this once so that there's only one book that gets gets digitized and the book is photographed. so a person turns the page, each page goes to click turns a page, raises and lowers glass. so that a nice image and click, click, click, click petals through a book. and then they just check the disks to make sure all the page numbers in there. nothing's fuzzy. it costs tens of dollars per book to go and digitize our books. then the physical book is preserved forever, which is an

expensive investment. the books are worth it. and then we take the digital file and we make it available to the blind and dyslexic. so the major use of these books is to the blind and dyslexic, and then we make other uses available that we're allowed to do. for instance, interlibrary loan of a chapter or control digital lending until this whole fight came up, it was going on for ten years. everybody was happy with it. it seemed like it all was working and so this is the ways that we are using these as well as machine learning. people are going and trying to find the first uses of words and phrases and things like that. research purposes, all the flowers and shakespeare, that kind of type of research. how did women and blacks be portrayed in early 20th century fiction? those types of research questions are the types of things that people are using.

the internet archives book collections for. so you use the number 26. and what is what is that reference? that's two weeks. so if somebody wants to read a book more than just a couple of pages where they sort of do it and then they hand it back, which is by far and away what happens. but if you want to go and compare it to something like going and borrowing a book from a public library that you're going to read, then you can check out a book for up to four, up to two weeks, and then you can try to renew it. but it means that there's basically 26 readers maximum per per book. and it turns out there are many, many, many, many, many fewer because we're dealing with dusty, musty, we're dealing with the 20th century, we're dealing with the long tail of books we never even put up the most recent five years of books, just to stay away from the the publisher's interest and to try not attract their ire, but their

ire in the early pandemic came to light. so, brewster carl, do you consider the internet archive to be a community lending library? in a sense? i think of it as a research library. so there are different kinds of libraries, so and it's not so much a lending library in the sense that people would go and take this and then read the whole book. that's just not it's not how we see people used the internet archive's collections. it's a research library that if you wanted to go and do some fact checks on the wikipedia article. so for instance, wikipedians, if there's a wrestle behind every web page to go and say what fact or assertion and makes it into the article and the way that that tussle is going goes on is are do you have a good citation and can you click on it? and if we want a strong wikipedia, which in this age of

disinformation, you want to go and make it so that people can click and see and reference the the claim so that it will stand up in wikipedia. otherwise, it will just be on whatever blog posts you can get a hold of. and we know that that's being actively poisoned by very well funded institutions such as states. so, so that's that's what the internet archive is, a research library. so brewster carl, if i've been on wikipedia and i click one of the citations, chances are i've used the internet archive. well, we've also fixed 17 million broken links in wikipedia. so yes, you'll probably have used the wayback machine. so we go over all wikipedia, try to find the links, see which ones are either massively changed or deleted. and we fix 17 million broken links and we have now a million links in wikipedia that go to over 250,000 books, which

foundations and and individual funded us to go and acquire those books and digitize them and weave them back into wikipedia to make wikipedia stronger. but it's not all just wikipedia, right? we have tremendous collections of theological information because seminaries are largely becoming decentralized or going out of business. and so they've donated a lot of theological materials, a lot of historic materials, a lot of things that are used by genealogists and the like. so that's the type of abuse that we tend to see. how do you monetize this? we don't at all. zero, none. so we are a nonprofit. we do accept donations. so there's a little part on our archive board and about 110,000 people go and go and contribute

to us. and actually more are contributing now because we're being attacked by these large scale publishers and other trolls. so in the libraries are really under attack everywhere. so we have politicians advocating book bans. we have legislatures now going and defunding libraries. we have these large scale publisher core corporations, billion dollar mega corporations that are suing not just the internet archive, but they sued maryland state for going and having the audacity to to pass a law saying that publishers have to go and give reasonable licensing deals to libraries. that was so they sued maryland and they're suing the internet archive. and so we're seeing libraries under attack. and what's happening is we now have a digital world. and if you just have one copy on

library, on publishers servers, they can change and delete it at any time. and that's what's happening. it's active happening. they've changed. agatha christie. jane woodhouse. other books that you know are famous have been changed. but thousands of books from wiley were just taken off of academic bookshelves that teachers were teaching with. so we basically have a level of control that we just have never seen in the real book. you know, real book industry. it's this e-book world where it's basically a netflix of books and it will tend towards just greatest hits and it's not what libraries are designed and funded for. brewster carroll this is a statement by terrence hart, the general counsel of the association of american publishers. quote, there is simply no legal support for the notion that internet archive or a library

may convert millions of e-books from print books to public for public distribution without the consent of or compensation to the authors and publishers. copyright not infringement is the engine of creativity that serves the public interest. so i don't think he's right. i mean, libraries have been doing have been buying publishers products forever, as long as there have been publishers and even before there are publishers libraries built collections and lent them out. this is the same thing in the digital world. it's very constrained. it's only one copy that is available to everyone. so it's an extremely constraining and a world that has been going on now for ten years by hundreds of libraries, and especially in the beginning of the pandemic, when all the libraries closed, we had all of this investment not able to be

seen in the physical form. so going in digitizing these and making them available is not only a fair use. it's good public policy. it's along the tradition of what libraries do and how libraries have supported publishers and authors forever. in the united states, where $12 billion industry are. library system about three or $4 billion of that goes to publishers products. it's basically a social support structure for about 20% of the trade books distributed in the united states is what the library system is. if we crush the library system and say, you can't buy anything and you can't go and make your old even out of print works and make those available, we will see what's going on, which is people will turn on the libraries, they'll become de-funded more and more and the labor base, which support the long tail of authors.

right? we buy everything. how do we go and have that support? if the publishers have their way, which is basically just a netflix of books. brewster kael, you used the term fair use. what does that mean when it comes to copyright law? fair use is a part of the american copyright doctrine. i'm not a lawyer that basically says that, yes, there are copyright rights, but there are exemptions that are fair use. there are okay to do so. for instance, when these same publishers went and sued google over their process, the judge said it's fair use their digital using these books, making them available as snippets, as searchable snippets. that's a fair use. there's lots of different of fair use of court cases. it's one of the escape valves on the sort of absurdly too much control that was put in place in

the united states in 1976, before or that, the copyright of ben franklin is you had copyright for 14 years, renewable ones and derivative works. no problem. so we had a long tradition in this country until it was sort of really screwed down in 1976 and fair use and specific exemptions for libraries to be able to offer. instance, lend. those are written into copyright law and are now being challenged in the courts by these billion dollar corporations. i've learned a lot about what happens when $1,000,000,000 corporations go after small nonprofit. it's it is a very tilted environment. i think we've all read about sort of what happens if you're poor or if you're a minority. but the same kind of tilt of the the justice system comes into play. if you're a small nonprofit. so you mentioned you are not a lawyer. what is your background? i'm a librarian.

so i started out as a computer scientist and i'll learn the technology. but the idea was that i saw as the opportune ity that the internet would become is the library that we'd been promising for a long time. vannevar bush or the library of congress on your desk, or ted nelson, xanadu two or what became a tim berners-lee vision of the world wide web? we could actually make that come true with this technology. so i went to library school, took us there and got no actually honorary degrees. i'm kind of happy about that. specifically in the library world, but then really went to build this all the internet into a library that can make it so that anybody anywhere can learn if they're curious enough to want to have access. this is not what the publishers are trying to have happen, but that's what libraries are for. we have our carnegie moment now

is to go and make it so that that dream of public education could be made more broadly available to people in disabilities that didn't have access to libraries or just wanted to have access digitally. we can do that fairly without it impacting the publisher during this whole lawsuit. they never even claimed there was a financial problem for them at all. i mean, 26 readers a year of a book. is that really going to cause damage? actually, often actually helps, but it's 26 readers a year, so they never claimed any damages. and so it's just sort of a quirk of the united states copyright law that has been influenced heavily by these billion dollar corporations over the course of decades to make it so that they can stop on libraries and brewster kael, how do you store your physical books that you've acquired? those are carefully contained.

they're not on shelves accessible, but we know where everyone is in. in a physical archive building. it's filled with boxes of books and it's now millions of them because libraries are deaccessioning. so it's not like you can just go back to your library and get some of these books because people want the space back for having meetings or maker labs or 3d printing or things like that. and so libraries are deaccessioning and they deaccession often to a nonprofit bookstore called better world books, and then they donate to us and to ban books for africa and other places. and or they go and directly donate those books to the internet archive. and fortunately, we have the funding to be able to go and preserve these physical books for decades. and we have been and it's working. so going and keeping funding

into the library system and making these treasures that are what people have spent their lives writing available to somebody. right. even if it's just 26 readers a year, that i think is a worthwhile investment. and it's turned out to be very useful, especially for research purposes. brewster cahill is the founder and the digital librarian of internet archive. archive.org is the website. mr. cahill, thank you fori'm gun

didn't expect to be here today, i'm also guessing that he didn't expect to be on speaking circuit, let alone write a book. and he's been saying in interviews rather be unknown. he didn't. he didn't at first expect to be a police officer in the coss