Publishers are using technical blocks to stop the Internet Archive from crawling their sites to prevent content from being used in AI training. Those steps can permanently remove copies of news and cultural materials from public archives even while the legal disputes over AI training continue.
— If publishers persist, future historians, journalists, and the public could lose large swaths of the digital record — a durable civic harm that outlasts the immediate copyright fights.
EditorDavid
2026.03.21
100% relevant
The New York Times (and reportedly The Guardian) adopted technical measures to block the Internet Archive’s crawlers; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) publicly criticized the move as erasing the historical record.
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