The Internet Archive has achieved a great deal in its twenty-year history. The website archive has become a huge virtual library in its own right. According to its own information, archive.org used a massive 18.5 petabytes of storage space for individual content in 2015 (a total of 50 petabytes, i.e. 50 trillion bytes) and has grown by several terabytes every week since then. According to the latest surveys, you can access around 327 billion old versions of websites via the Wayback Machine. In addition, the project collects:
- Texts and books (around 16 million)
- Audio recordings (about 4.4 million, including 189,000 live recordings of concerts)
- Videos und TV productions (about 5.8 million, of which about 1.6 million are news records)
- Images (around 3,1 million)
- Software programs (around 209.000)
(Updated: April 2018)
A lot of the content comes from universities, government organizations such as NASA, from text digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg or Arvix, and also of film and audio collections like the Prelinger Collection, or live music archive Etree.
Brewster Kahle is a net activist who is not only committed to a free Internet, but generally to freely accessible knowledge. He was one of the most popular opponents of the so-called “mickey mouse protection act” (the actual name is the “copyright term extension act”), which was supported by Disney. This law led to an extension of copyright law in the States. From now on, works are protected by copyright for up to 70 years (and not - as before - 50 years) after the death of an author or creator. According to Kahle, property rights this lengthy would only benefit the richest companies, while the works would not be usable by the general public.
In 2007, the State of California officially recognized the Internet Archive as a library. One of the many computer centers that store backup copies of the archive is located in the Bibliotheca Alexandria, newly opened in 2002 under UNESCO patronage.
The daughter website archive-it.org works with numerous scientific organizations that want to digitally archive their collections.