Brewster Kahle
A passionate advocate for public internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. He is the Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the internet's first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server, later selling it to AOL. In 1996, he co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the web, and sold it to Amazon in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ unique petabytes of data–the books, web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage–and works with more than 950 libraries and university partners to create a digital library that is accessible to all.
Sessions
In 2020, four of the world’s largest publishers sued the nonprofit library, the Internet Archive, to try to stop its digital book lending program. Publishers want to license–not sell–ebooks. Is this lawsuit the last shot at libraries actually owning & lending digital books? Is th