“We came before copyright. But publishers now think of libraries as customer service departments for their database products.”

Thanks to their digital nature, e-books are treated much differently. They can’t be resold or given away. A library that wants to lend e-books must buy a license from the copyright holder. These subscriptions can be limited to a number of reads, or by periods of a year or two. Everything is tracked. Libraries own nothing.

“The more information is free, the more opportunities for it to be collected, refined, packaged and made expensive,” said Stewart Brand, the technology visionary who first developed the formulation. “The more it is expensive, the more workarounds to make it free. It’s a paradox. Each side makes the other true.”

Each side accuses the other of bad faith, and calls its opponents well-funded zealots who won’t listen to reason and want to destroy the culture.

When a physical book is sold, the “first sale” provision of copyright law says the author and publisher have no control over that volume’s fate in the world. It can be resold, and they don’t get a cut. It can be lent out as many times as readers demand. The information in the text flows freely through society without leaving a trace. Religions and ... See more

In 2021, when the archive celebrated its 25th anniversary, Mr. Kahle talked about the fate of the internet in an era of megacorporations: “Will this be our medium or will it be theirs? Will it be for a small controlling set of organizations or will it be a common good, a public resource?