Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record

Major publishers like The New York Times are blocking the Internet Archive from crawling their websites, ostensibly to prevent AI companies from scraping their content. However, the Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library preserving the web's historical record, not a commercial AI system, and blocking it risks erasing decades of irreplaceable documentation. Courts have long recognized archiving and search indexing as fair use, making the publishers' response both misdirected and harmful to public access.