Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ‘Soul of the Internet’

I n the old chapel of a former Christian Science church in San Francisco, late-afternoon sun pours orange through the windows and several giant servers are hard at work. The tall, black towers fill two large alcoves and their cooling fans emit a serene, industrial hum as blue lights blink. Each flicker, says the man in charge of this operation, Brewster Kahle, is a virtual patron of the enormous digital library called the Internet Archive.

Across the room, near where the pulpit would be, sits a sculpture of chunky, red, antiquated computer monitors flashing bygone web pages — a snapshot of the World Wide Web in 1997, and the earliest entry to the Internet Archive’s enormous digital collection. 

But it’s the statues — lined up against the walls and in the pews — that grab your attention. Hundreds of miniature replicas of past and present Internet Archive employees. Three more just arrived yesterday, Kahle, 63, tells me last fall as he points out his own. The statue’s wire-frame glasses match his; the white hair, however, is more tight and curled than the tufts that halo his actual head, making him look a bit like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Kahle’s statue carries a book in one hand and a computer mouse in the other, the latter held out like an offering. 

“Nobody makes any money here, right?” says Kahle. “So you do this for some other reason. Why do you do it? Because you want to be proud of what you do.”

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