News sites – including major papers such as the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Guardian and social media sites such as Reddit — have made archivists the collateral damage in their attempts to protect their copyright and prevent their content being used to train artificial intelligence. In total, recent research found that 251 websites from 9 countries have blocked the Internet Archive’s crawler bots. It is these bots that populate the “Wayback Machine,” which allows users to see a snapshot of a website at different points in the past, even if it is currently offline.
Against this backdrop, the Internet Archive has updated and re-issued its 2024 book, Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record, for 2026. The Internet Archive is a virtual library that aims to collect and preserve as much of the public internet as possible. As so much of cultural exchange and cultural creation now happens on the internet, this archive is essential for preserving and protecting its contribution to human history. Threats to its capacity to do this risk creating “gaps in the public memory,” the book warns.
“Obscene copyright lengths—coupled with physical media obsolescence—equally leads to loss,” the book notes. Copyright protection generally lasts the life of the author plus 70 years; during this time, content can only be issued by the rights holder, who will only do so if there is a financial incentive. What this means in practice is that all but the most popular of works will have faded from accessibility and the public memory by the time their copyright has expired.
“In response to the risk of materials falling into oblivion, humanity has built libraries and archives big and small, and developed rigorous preservation practices, so that the past need not be so easily lost… only through access will their survival prove meaningful to the next generation,” reads the book’s introduction.
But this drive towards preservation and access is counterbalanced by publishers seeking to limit access to their copyrighted works. And this innate tension between archivists and publishers is facing new frontiers in an age of AI. Library resources like the Internet Archive are now warning that its mission is in jeopardy as rights holders have steadily worked to erode the capacity of archivists to preserve material.
The book shares experiences of cultural preservation and loss across several spheres of creative content: books and materials; news; film, TV and sound; and digital culture. The extent to which media vanishing is as-yet unquantified, but the book is a significant call to seek social, legal and technical solutions to protect and preserve cultural history.
