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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The Internet Wayback Machine aims to archive everything online. But will copyright laws leave nothing but junk?
Nov 2, 2001 | Brewster Kahle may be the last Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur in the waning days of 2001 who isn't embarrassed to boast about his Big Idea. Maybe that's because he's not trying to make any money with it.
"The last time someone really tried to do this it was 2,000 years ago. It's the chutzpah of the Greeks," he bragged at the launch party for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on Oct. 24. "There are only 5 billion people in the world and they can only be typing 60 words a minute, 24 hours a day. So, that bounds it," he said to an admiring audience of librarians, academics and computer scientists gathered at UC-Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
Kahle, the founder of the Web "navigation company" Alexa, started the nonprofit as a side project five years ago. The idea was simple: to preserve the notoriously ephemeral Web by grabbing as many pages as possible and storing them for history. So far, the archive holds more than 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. "Our opportunity is not only to have it all, but to make it widely available. That is the opportunity of our time," he crowed.
The opportunity of our time! It's been a while since anyone has been willing to pump out some of that old-school hyperbole so familiar from the Internet hot-air balloon of the late '90s. But that's not all. "The idea of making all knowledge available to anyone on the planet is the democratic ideal," Kahle said.
It's certainly a very geeky version of the democratic ideal -- tons and tons of unsorted data. Quantities of such scope that it's measured not in megabytes or gigabytes, but terabytes -- 100 of them, which adds up to about 100 trillion bytes. And it's an ideal that has attracted a lot of excitement from a tech press corps desperate to find something to pay attention to in the post Sept. 11 era.
While Kahle and his co-conspirators have been putting the pieces of the archive together for five years, the debut of his new Web interface -- the Internet Archive Wayback Machine finally makes traveling back in time in the history of the Web as easy as using a search engine. In its early weeks online, the Wayback Machine has proved so popular that the site's Web servers are laboring mightily: The home page has been broadcasting an apology: "Warning: Service intermittent. We apologize for not anticipating the usage this service is receiving. We are working on adding servers, but this process will take weeks. Again, we apologize."
That very popularity could threaten more harm to the project than just overloaded servers. Kahle's geeky democratic ideal -- all the information! for everyone! all the time! forever! -- is the same formula that has made so many other Internet utopia engines -- think Napster -- run headlong into the restrictions of old-fashioned copyright law. And while in the last five years the archive hasn't attracted much attention from the copyright cops, it's also true that its 100-terabyte holdings hadn't previously been just a click of the mouse away.
