The campaign argues that the NYT, The Atlantic, and USA Today should stop threatening the Internet Archive because the Wayback Machine's 835 billion archived pages represent an irreplaceable historical record of the web. With Google Cache being deprecated and no comparable alternatives, losing the Wayback Machine would mean the web effectively has no memory.
Submitted the campaign to Hacker News where it reached a score of 244, indicating strong community agreement that the Wayback Machine is a critical public resource worth defending against publisher pressure.
The editorial acknowledges the publishers' perspective: if readers can access cached versions of articles on archive.org, it undermines the paywall model that funds journalism. The NYT, Atlantic, and USA Today see archived copies as directly competing with their subscription revenue, which is a reasonable business concern even if it conflicts with preservation goals.
The editorial highlights that the Second Circuit's 2023 ruling against the Internet Archive's controlled digital lending program has emboldened publishers to expand pressure beyond books into web archiving itself. The precedent that digital preservation isn't automatically fair use gives legal cover to publishers escalating against the Wayback Machine's core function of preserving web snapshots.
A campaign at savethearchive.com is calling on the public to pressure three major news publishers — The New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today — to back off legal threats against the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. The campaign, which reached the front page of Hacker News with a score of 244, provides form letters and contact information to make it easy for supporters to reach these publishers directly.
The campaign comes in the wake of the Internet Archive's legal defeats. In 2023, a federal court ruled against the Archive in *Hachette v. Internet Archive*, finding that its National Emergency Library — which briefly removed borrowing limits on digitized books during COVID — constituted copyright infringement. The Second Circuit upheld that ruling on appeal, effectively killing the Archive's controlled digital lending program for books and establishing a precedent that digital preservation doesn't automatically qualify as fair use.
Now the pressure is expanding. Major news publishers, including the three named in the campaign, have been escalating efforts to restrict the Wayback Machine's ability to archive their articles. This goes beyond the book-lending dispute into the core function that most people associate with archive.org: preserving snapshots of the web as it existed at a given moment.
The Wayback Machine has archived over 835 billion web pages since 1996. It is, for practical purposes, the only comprehensive historical record of the internet. Google Cache is being deprecated. Individual site archives are spotty at best. Without the Wayback Machine, the web has no memory.
For news publishers, the tension is straightforward: they see archived copies of their articles as competing with paywalled content. Why would someone pay for a NYT subscription if they can read a cached version on archive.org? It's a reasonable business concern. But the campaign argues — and the Hacker News community overwhelmingly agrees — that the tradeoff is catastrophic. Archived news articles aren't just content; they're the primary source record for historical events, legal proceedings, academic research, and investigative journalism.
The irony is thick. News organizations themselves are among the heaviest users of the Wayback Machine. Journalists routinely use it to recover deleted statements, track changes to corporate websites, and verify claims against historical records. The very publishers threatening the Archive depend on it for their own reporting.
There's also a deeper architectural concern. The legal theory that archiving a publicly accessible web page constitutes infringement doesn't stop at news articles. If courts establish that automated web archiving violates copyright, the precedent reaches into search engine caching, AI training data collection, Common Crawl, academic research corpora, and any service that preserves or indexes web content. The publishers may be fighting over their paywalls, but the blast radius is the entire infrastructure of web preservation.
If you're a developer, the Wayback Machine is infrastructure you use without thinking about it. Every time you've recovered documentation for a deprecated library, found an old API reference, or tracked down a blog post that explained a cryptic design decision, you were relying on archive.org.
Consider how much technical knowledge lives exclusively on the web in non-permanent forms: blog posts on platforms that shut down (Medium pivots, Heroku's blog restructuring), documentation for tools that got acquired and sunset, Stack Overflow answers that reference now-dead links. The Wayback Machine is the backstop for all of it. Without it, link rot becomes permanent knowledge loss.
Practically, there are a few things developers can do beyond signing the campaign's letter:
Archive proactively. If you maintain documentation, technical blogs, or open-source project pages, submit them to the Wayback Machine explicitly. Use the "Save Page Now" feature or the Archive's API to ensure your content is preserved regardless of what happens to your hosting.
Support alternative archiving. Projects like ArchiveBox let you run your own personal web archive. If the institutional Wayback Machine gets legally constrained, distributed personal archives may be the fallback.
Watch the legal precedent. The *Hachette* ruling was about books, but the legal reasoning — that digital copies compete with the original market — applies directly to web archiving. If publishers win broad injunctions against the Wayback Machine, expect the same arguments to be used against developer-adjacent services like package registries that cache metadata, documentation aggregators, and AI training pipelines.
It's worth steelmanning the publishers' position, because dismissing it makes the defense weaker. News organizations are in genuine financial distress. The NYT is one of the few that found a sustainable digital subscription model. The Atlantic nearly went under before Laurene Powell Jobs's investment. USA Today's parent company Gannett has been through rounds of brutal layoffs. These aren't abstract corporate entities protecting profits — they're organizations trying to survive a market that has systematically devalued their product.
When a paywalled article is available for free on archive.org, it does represent lost revenue, even if the scale is debatable. Publishers argue that they should have the same right to control distribution of their digital content as any other copyright holder. The counter-argument — that web archiving serves a distinct preservation purpose and doesn't meaningfully substitute for a subscription — is legally untested in this specific context.
The real question isn't whether publishers have a right to protect their content. It's whether that right should extend to destroying the only comprehensive archive of the web. The campaign at savethearchive.com is betting that when you frame it that way, the answer is obvious.
The Internet Archive is at an inflection point. The *Hachette* loss narrowed its legal standing. Publisher pressure is increasing. And the organization operates on a nonprofit budget that can't sustain extended litigation against well-funded media companies. The outcome of this fight will determine whether the web in 2030 has any accessible historical record of the web in 2020 — or whether we collectively decided that copyright enforcement was more important than memory. For developers who build on the assumption that the internet remembers things, this is worth paying attention to.
Top 10 dev stories every morning at 8am UTC. AI-curated. Retro terminal HTML email.