Public Domain Day: Looking Ahead To 2021

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Rudolph Valentino stars in the 1925 film “The Eagle.” On January 1, 2021, this film and many more will enter the public domain.

What do the song “Sweet Georgia Brown,” The Great Gatsby and Rudolph Valentino in “The Eagle” all share in common? They were all first released in 1925. And looking ahead, that means that when the sun rises on 2021, thousands of works of literature, film, music and art will enter the public domain. We think having free access to these cultural riches is something to celebrate!

Please join us December 17th for a virtual celebration of the public domain. Presented by Internet Archive, Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and SPARC, this event will bring together a diverse group of organizations, musicians, artists, activists, and thinkers to highlight the new works entering the public domain in 2021 and discuss those elements of knowledge and creativity that are too important to a healthy society to lock down with copyright law.

Our virtual celebration will be on December 17, 2020, at 3pm PT. Registration is free and open to the public.

REGISTER NOW

Virginia Woolf’s classic, Mrs. Dalloway was first published in 1925. It enters the public domain on January 1, 2021.

The public domain is our shared cultural heritage, a near limitless trove of creativity that’s been reused, remixed, and reimagined over centuries to create new works of art and science. The public domain forms the building blocks of culture because these works are not restricted by copyright law. Generally, works come into the public domain when their copyright term expires. This year, works first published in 1925 are entering the public domain for all to share.

Internet Archive Responds to Proposal for Major Copyright Reform

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This week, the Internet Archive submitted a letter in response to a set of questions posed by Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) regarding potential reforms to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the law that provides a safe harbor against copyright liability for Internet services who abide by notice and takedown obligations. The Senator’s questions indicate that he is interested in potentially broad changes to not only the DMCA, but to copyright law more generally. His letter states “[r]ather than tinker around the edges of existing provisions, I believe Congress should reform copyright law’s framework to better encourage the creation of copyrightable works and to protect users and consumers making lawful uses of copyrighted goods and software-enabled products, respectively.” The emphasis on ensuring that the law protects users and consumers is welcome, as concern for Internet users was almost entirely absent from the US Copyright Office report on the DMCA that was issued this past summer.

In our response, we express our concern that drastic changes to the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA:

“Could have disproportionately negative impacts on public service non–profits such as the Internet Archive and our patrons. The Internet Archive is first and foremost a library. We use technology and the Internet to deliver valuable services and collections to the public. The Internet Archive’s goal of being a steward of knowledge is facilitated by the safe harbors, which shield us from liability for the occasional user who uploads infringing content, while allowing the vast majority of legal content to remain accessible.

Therefore, we provide these responses as an online service provider that hosts so-called “user generated content” and as a library with a mission to preserve and provide public access to cultural materials. In our view, while the DMCA system is not perfect, it generally works well and serves its intended purpose. As such, any substantial changes should be discouraged, including the controversial and untested “notice and stay down” system discussed in the Copyright Office report.”

You can read our full letter here.

We wish to express our appreciation to the law students at the New York University Technology Law & Policy Clinic for their deft assistance researching and drafting these public comments. It is our pleasure to partner with the next generation of legal scholars who will help shape the future of copyright law.

As always, we invite our patrons and the community of rightsholders who share their digital works with the Internet Archive to express your comments and suggestions.


Internet Archive Broadens Global Access to Theological Material

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

As the Internet Archive digitizes an increasing amount of material from seminary libraries, future church leaders are using modern technology to easily access ancient teachings.

Claremont School of Theology, Hope International University, Evangelical Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary have all recently donated portions of their library collections to the Internet Archive or are working with the Internet Archive to digitize their materials. The scanned books and periodicals will be available freely online at archive.org to anyone who wants to check them out one item at a time through Controlled Digital Lending.

The move solved logistical and storage problems for Claremont, Hope and Evangelical, all of which were relocating or downsizing. Faced with a space crunch, transforming their collections from print to digital format allowed the libraries to provide continual access – and extend their reach.

For Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), partnering with the Archive has enabled it to get textbooks in the hands of students who are learning at a distance. With campus buildings closed during the pandemic, libraries have been clamoring for ebooks but many vendors do not sell or license to libraries, creating a barrier to learning for disadvantaged students.

Online access through the Archive has also expanded checkout privileges to alumni, which is a major issue for academic libraries.

Karl Stutzman, director of library services, AMBS

“Theological education aims to develop lifelong learners, so the need for the library doesn’t stop at graduation. A free online library is a huge resource,” says Karl Stutzman, director of library services at AMBS. “Church leaders who are reflective and compassionate have an impact on communities of faith, which in turn have an impact on their neighborhoods and nations. Increasingly, we are educating church leaders who are mobile and international. They need high quality online resources.”

Through a collaborative project with the Archive, AMBS has scanned 100 years of the Gospel Herald and The Mennonite journals. Having the materials available digitally, means users can search for articles or names without having to page through documents manually. The Archive has also digitized some older books that were out of print, bringing new life to the titles. In one instance, rights to a book went back to a faculty member author, who was pleased to make his book freely available online and used in a recent class that wouldn’t otherwise be available, says Stutzman.

Resources at the theological school have a long shelf time, but are not always available from publishers in electronic versions, says Stutzman. Scanning items the library already owns provides needed access through the CDL model. AMBS’s digital library (which continues to grow), along with the rich collections from other seminary libraries, will conveniently allow religious leaders to study and further their education, he says.

“Library resources need to be shared. The world is already so unequal.”

Jeffrey Kuan, president, Claremont School of Theology

In June, Claremont School of Theology donated 250,000 volumes from its library to the Internet Archive as its campus faced a move from Southern California. It is in the process of affiliating with Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and President Jeffrey Kuan is guiding the school through the transition.

“It was going to be very expensive to relocate the entire library collection. It would cost us millions of dollars, plus annual maintenance,” says Kuan, who didn’t want to consider disposing of the collection.

At the same time, Claremont’s 300 students were increasingly using online resources since the school started the Digital Theological Library (DTL), a consortium with 40 institutions housing over 600,000 digital books and tens of millions of articles. After the DTL was launched, students at Claremont began accessing the digital collection five times more than the physical collection on campus.

Jeffrey Kuan, president, Claremont School of Theology

Kuan oversaw the transfer of 50,000 volumes from Claremont to Willamette and the rest were packed up for scanning by the Archive. The donated items include a wealth of books in feminist theology, Afro-Carribean spirituality, as well as the school’s Ancient Biblical Manuscripts Collection. Kuan says seeing theological education in a global context, there is great need in Asia, Africa and Latin America for library resources.

 “We saw it both from a financial perspective that it made sense and as a contribution to the distribution of knowledge to the world that it makes perfect sense,” Kuan says. “Library resources need to be shared. The world is already so unequal.”

On the other side of the country, Princeton Theological Seminary has also been a leader in making its collection available online. It partnered with the Archive in 2008 to establish a regional digitization center on the East Coast to scan materials in the public domain. It later created the Theological Commons with 150,000 digital resources on theology and religion drawn from numerous research libraries and digitized by the Archive.

Interior of Princeton Theological Seminary Library

“We’ve utilized the Internet Archive approach of making these [public domain] materials not just publicly viewable, but also downloadable,” says Greg Murray, director of digital initiatives at Princeton Seminary. “We’ve built a custom, subject-matter specific, digital library that far exceeds what we could have done with our own collection. That’s what we love about the Archive…the openness and technical infrastructure to provide materials that are relevant to our researchers.”

Like other seminaries, Princeton Seminary is a small institution—separate from Princeton University. It is a stand-alone seminary with less than 400 students and doesn’t have the resources on the scale of a divinity school associated with a large university. That made digitizing its collection and collaborating with other seminaries a draw, says Murray.

While the full impact of the open collection is hard to measure, materials are being accessed from users domestically and internationally. Now the seminary is beginning to add copyrighted items to the Archive in the CDL system, providing a wealth of resources in various disciplines, Murray says.  

“Access is the biggest benefit. And when you have a public health crisis, the benefit is even more pronounced having these materials online,” Murray says. “It’s also available to anyone around the world who can’t travel to Princeton….It seems like a natural extension of what the library has always done.”

Stutzman of AMBS says he’s excited about so much new theological content being available worldwide. “The reality is that Christianity is not just a U.S. phenomenon,” he says. “The hot spots using this material are often overseas in under-resourced areas. Having these materials available online in places that are just getting the Internet is going to be a really welcome addition.”

2020 Census + Internet Archive = Democracy

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2020 has been a wild year for all of us. I think we all looked forward to such an interesting-sounding year, and knew, at the onset of a new decade, additional importance would inherently be attached: a US presidential election, the Olympics, the sheer joy of having numerical continuity to lean on. For those who follow the machinations of the US government closely, we also knew there was a census scheduled to occur, the once-a-decade effort by the US Census Bureau to accurately quantify the population of the United States. This valiant effort is instrumental in providing data that drives important decisions, from the amount of federal funding districts get for schools, hospitals, and other services, to the number of seats each state will have in the House of Representatives.



It is critically important to have an accurate count to drive these decisions. At the Internet Archive, we understood that importance and wanted to help. Late in 2019, we were contacted by representatives from the US Census Bureau inquiring to utilize our Headquarters to train workers for the census count — enumerators, as they’re called. We heartily responded with a yes. When our founder, Brewster Kahle, chose this building as our Headquarters, it was in part to be able to support civic measures such as this.



Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a massive wrench into these plans. From our initial conversations, we had pegged late March 2020 as the time to commence the training, which unfortunately coincided with the global shutdown to quell the spread of the virus. So many conflicting emotions colored those days early in the pandemic — fear, uncertainty — but with respect to this commitment we’d made to help, we couldn’t help but feel for the organizers of the census. Many of them are volunteers, many of them in higher-risk categories for this virus and now faced an immensely more difficult challenge. They were now asked to train workers and collect data during this very difficult time, all with the goal of attaining an accurate count. So we kept the lines of communication open, checking every week or so to see how their plans were developing, and continued to offer our support.

Eventually, as the calendar shifted from spring to summer, we settled on a plan and some dates — having groups of eight enumerators be trained in shifts over the course of the first week in August. For those unfamiliar with our Headquarters in San Francisco, we are fortunate to have a 600-person auditorium we refer to as the Great Room, which was well-suited to conduct this safely. It has large windows and doors that are able to remain open, large fans circulating the air, and a separate entrance for folks to come and go.



All told, 40 people were trained to help conduct the census in and around San Francisco. We had hoped to help to a larger extent, but such is life in 2020. It’s hard to tell how much of an impact this had, but we hope it helped, and it remains important to us to support these often unseen but critical aspects of how a community and a society functions.

Hopefully, we’ll all be around in 2030 the next time the census rolls around and we can further assist this effort. To learn more about the census, follow the link below, and be sure to thank a census worker if you run across one.

https://2020census.gov/en.html

Contest: The Internet Archive is Looking For Creative Short Films Made By You!

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[23 submissions, which is now closed.]

We are looking for artists of all levels to create and upload a short film of 2-3 minutes to the Internet Archive to help us celebrate Public Domain Day on December 17th!

Public Domain Day is a celebration of all the rich content that will be newly available to the public free of copyright restrictions from the year 1925. We want artists to use this newly available content to create short films that contain content from the archive’s collection from 1925. The uploaded videos will be judged and prizes of up to $1500 awarded!! (Please see details below)

Winners will be announced and shown at the virtual Public Domain Day Celebration on December 17th at 3pm Pacific (registration opens soon), and we will introduce the artists. All other participating videos will be added to a Public Domain Day Art Collection on archive.org and featured in a blog entry in January of 2021.

Here are a few examples of some of the rich content that is now available for you to use:

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:  

  • The Great Gatsby (going Public Domain January 1, 2021)
  • Gilded Age, Industrial Age

Guidelines

  • Make a 2-3 minute movie using Newly Public Domain Material from 1925 (If you have something to add to the Internet Archive from 1925, then please add it in and feel free to use it)
  • Mix and Mash content however you like
  • Add a personal touch, make it yours!
  • Keep the videos light hearted and fun (It is a celebration after all!)

Submission Deadline

All submissions must be in by Midnight, December 13th, 2020 (PST)

How to Submit

Prizes

  • 1st prize: $1500
  • 2nd prize: $1000
  • 3rd prize: $500

*All prizes sponsored by the Kahle/Austin Foundation

Judges

Judges will be looking for videos that are fun and interesting for showing at the Public Domain Day virtual party and that highlight the value of having cultural materials that can be reused, remixed, and re-contextualized for a new day. Winner’s pieces will be purchased with the prize money, and then put into public domain under a CC0 license.

  • Amir Saber Esfahani (Director of Special Arts Projects, Internet Archive)
  • Carrie Hott (Artist and Professor, University San Francisco)
  • Brewster Kahle (Founder, Digital Librarian, Internet Archive)

FOSS wins again: Free and Open Source Communities comes through on 19th Century Newspapers (and Books and Periodicals…)

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I have never been more encouraged and thankful to Free and Open Source communities. Three months ago I posted a request for help with OCR’ing and processing 19th Century Newspapers and we got soooo many offers to help.  Thank you, that was heart warming and concretely helpful– already based on these suggestions we are changing over our OCR and PDF software completely to FOSS, making big improvements, and building partnerships with FOSS developers in companies, universities, and as individuals that will propel the Internet Archive to have much better digitized texts.  I am so grateful, thank you.   So encouraging.

I posted a plea for help on the Internet Archive blog: Can You Help us Make the 19th Century Searchable? and we got many social media offers and over 50 comments the post– maybe a record response rate.   

We are already changing over our OCR to Tesseract/OCRopus and leveraging many PDF libraries to create compressed, accessible, and archival PDFs.

Several people suggested the German government-lead initiative called OCR-D that has made production level tools for helping OCR and segment complex and old materials such as newspapers in the old German script Fraktur, or black letter.  (The Internet Archive had never been able to process these, and now we are doing it at scale).   We are also able to OCR more Indian languages which is fantastic.  This Government project is FOSS, and has money for outreach to make sure others use the tools– this is a step beyond most research grants. 

Tesseract has made a major step forward in the last few years.  When we last evaluated the accuracy it was not as good as the proprietary OCR, but that has changed– we have done evaluations and it is just as good, and can get better for our application because of its new architecture.   

Underlying the new Tesseract is a LSTM engine similar to the one developed for Ocropus2/ocropy, which was a project led by Tom Breuel (funded by Google, his former German University, and probably others– thank you!). He has continued working on this project even though he left academia.  A machine learning based program is introducing us to GPU based processing, which is an extra win.  It can also be trained on corrected texts so it can get better.  

Proprietary example from an Anti-Slavery newspaper from my blog post:

New one, based on free and open source software that is still faulty but better:

The time it takes on our cluster to compute is approximately the same, but if we add GPU’s we should be able to speed up OCR and PDF creation, maybe 10 times, which would help a great deal since we are processing millions of pages a day.

The PDF generation is a balance trying to achieve small file size as well as rendering quickly in browser implementations, have useful functionality (text search, page numbers, cut-and-paste of text), and comply with archival (PDF/A) and accessibility standards (PDF/UA). At the heart of the new PDF generation is the “archive-pdf-tools” Python library, which performs Mixed Raster Content (MRC) compression, creates a hidden text layer using a modified Tesseract PDF renderer that can read hOCR files as input, and ensures the PDFs are compatible with archival standards (VeraPDF is used to verify every PDF that we generate against the archival PDF standards). The MRC compression decomposes each image into a background, foreground and foreground mask, heavily compressing (and sometimes downscaling) each layer separately. The mask is compressed losslessly, ensuring that the text and lines in an image do not suffer from compression artifacts and look clear. Using this method, we observe a 10x compression factor for most of our books.

The PDFs themselves are created using the high-performance mupdf and pymupdf python library: both projects were supportive and promptly fixed various bugs, which propelled our efforts forwards.

And best of all, we have expanded our community to include people all over the world that are working together to make cultural materials more available. We have a slack channel for OCR researchers and implementers now, that you can join if you would like (to join, drop an email to merlijn@archive.org). We look to contribute software and data sets to these projects to help them improve (lead by Merlijn Wajer and Derek Fukumori).

Next steps to fulfill the dream of Vanevar Bush’s Memex, Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web,  Raj Ready’s call for Universal Access to All Knowledge (and now the Internet Archive’s mission statement):

  • Find articles in periodicals, and get the titles/authors/footnotes
  • Linking footnote citations to other documents
  • OCR Balinese palm leaf manuscripts based 17,000 hand entered pages.
  • Improve Tesseract page handling to improve OCR and segmentation
  • Improve epub creation, including images from pages
  • Improve OCRopus by creating training datasets

Any help here would be most appreciated.

Thank you, Free and Open Source Communities!  We are glad to be part of such a sharing and open world.

Flash Back! Further Thoughts on Flash at the Internet Archive

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A little behind the scenes here at the Archive: this blog is the province of a wide range of sub-groups, from books and partnerships over to development and collaborators. There’s usually a little traffic jam to schedule or make sure entries don’t go over each other, so this “sequel” post is being written before we return you to other Archive news.

The big announcement last week about the Internet Archive hosting Flash animations/games and making them run in the browser thanks to the Emularity and Ruffle made a huge splash. If you haven’t read that entry, you should definitely read it first.

Here’s some observations about Flash and the Internet Ecosystem from the last three rambunctious days. Obviously, the story of us including Flash doesn’t end here – we’ll continue to update Ruffle as it improves, and both users and collaborators are adding new animations at a pretty stunning clip. Be sure to keep checking the Flash Collection at the Archive for new additions.

What have we learned so far?

The Idea of Playing Flash in the Browser Past The End of The Year Is Very Popular

It was assumed, and has proven out, that being able to play Flash items, be they animations, toys or games, is an extremely popular idea: Tens of thousands of people have been flooding into the Archive to try things out. The “death” of Flash as a default plugin for browsers and the removal of easy access to it definitely had many people sad and concerned.

That said, assuming that Adobe and any other vendors were not going to throw the significant resources behind security and maintenance that Flash plugins would require, removing default support for it made sense. Sometimes these choices are not great for the historical Web, but sideloading in significant attack surfaces just because people like old games is not ideal either.

Ruffle is not Flash. It is an emulator that takes .SWF files (which worked with Flash) and makes a very good attempt to display what the file means to do. It is written in an entire other language with an entire other team of programmers, and is working with a specification and history that is ossified. In that way, it is hoped that the security issues of Flash can be avoided but the works can live on.

And are they living on!

Even in the very short time that this new feature has been announced, the news was picked up by Boing Boing, Engadget, The Verge, The Register, Gizmodo, PC Gamer, and dozens of other locations (and the top spot at Hacker News for a while). That increased the flood of visitors to our site and we’ve held up pretty well, due to the high compression rates and small file sizes of Flash.

People Have Very Strong Memories of Flash; For Some It Represents Childhood

Everyone has a different timeline with computers and the internet, but for countless people using their phones and connections today, Flash plays as critical a role in their childhood memories as a game console or television show. Students could sneak flash games into the computer labs, or trade USB sticks with Flash, or simply get around filters preventing “obvious” entertainment sites to find a single URL that gave them a racing or RPG game to while away an afternoon on.

And, most notably, not just as players, but as creators. There are, it turns out, a significant amount of professional artists and coders who count Flash and related technologies as their very first “programming language”. Going through our collection, you can find ten-person studio productions side-by-side a game made by a driven teenager at home, and the teenager will have gotten more popular. Intended to be used for creative works, the Flash environments over the years provided the launchpad for thousands of careers and creative outlets.

The Role of Flash Wasn’t Obvious To a Lot of People

An interesting situation as people come face to face with in some of these animations in the Flash collection are that many didn’t know they were Flash.

Video sites, such as Youtube, are a mid to late 2000s addition to the Internet. Previously, with dial-up modems as the main connection to the Internet, streaming video was a distant and hazy dream that seemed impossible to provide beyond a small experimental or well-connected crowd. Filling that need was Flash, which could compress down incredibly small (a full song and video to accompany it could be under five megabytes, or even one megabyte) and they even had quality settings for less powerful computers. Flash animation could “pre-load” the data required that was coming over a modem, giving an update as to progress or a small game to play, until the full “video” was downloaded. This has all been swept away into the dustbin of memory in a world where 4k 60fps video is possible (if still not to everyone).

With the jump to video in the mid 2000s, many Flash animations were transcoded into MPEG files, or animated GIFs, or uploaded to Youtube as fully-realized video, even though Flash was the original medium. As the more well-crafted works gained attention in this new space, the old formats were forgotten.

Since the Ruffle browser has a fullscreen option (right-click, soon to be a button to the right of the animation), if the Flash animation was done using vectors, they will scale up to 4k displays smoothly. Unlike old video, the original works will keep up with the newest technology very nicely and will give added appreciation for the efforts in the original piece.

Flooding All These Old Flash Works Has High and Low Moments

Because nearly anyone could create flash animations and games, nearly anyone did. It also meant that filters on quality, profanity, or unusual subjects were gone.

Sometimes that worked out very nicely: Imagine trying to pitch an animated film like The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny to a studio or backers to make for film festivals. A game like Castle Cat is bizarre and a collage of pop culture but plays as well as a professional game at the time. (it even got a sequel.)

Other times, the works are clunky, poorly programmed, and full of offensive jokes and material. They could literally be after-school projects or whipped up in a weekend to make fun of someone or something and then get trapped in amber to the present day. Wandering the stacks, with what will soon be thousands of items, can be daunting.

As a result, the Showcase was created to highlight the best of the best, the handful that really universally stand out as entertaining, well-made, and uplifting (or at least, thought-provoking).

By the way, if the towering piles of Flash works seems daunting now, imagine what it was like 20 years ago for people slowly moving through page after page, taking minutes to download a given animation, and clicking on it with no idea what they’d be seeing next.

Adding Your Own Flash Is Difficult But Rewarding

It is notably complicated to add new working Flash to our collection. This is a side effect of all the different components that need to be activated in the Internet Archive structure. By far, the best document to read about how to test, upload, and describe SWF files is this document by the Flashpoint project:

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for_the_Internet_Archive

(As a side note, the two most common mistakes are setting “emulator-ext” instead of “emulator_ext” (see the difference?) and not setting the item to be a “software” media type. A script has been written that checks new uploads to find common mistakes and will sometimes tweak the uploads to fix them.)

There’s Still A Long Way to Go To “Perfect” or Wayback Playback

We shoved this entire ecosystem into the Archive “hot”, with known gaps in support for Flash features, and with bugs still being ironed out. Most Flash animations used a rather small set of scripting commands within the potential list, and those have been focused on by the Ruffle team, so a lot of animations do just fine. But more than just a few times, a Flash item will go in and there will be a critical failure, be it the inability to hit buttons or missing video/audio. This reflects the continual improvement of the emulator but also that entire swaths of support are still a way to go.

This also provides the answer to the question some are asking, which is how long before the Wayback Machine “just plays” old Flash items when you go to the page. Ruffle is still way too new to shove into the Wayback and the problems it would cause at this stage would be significant. Many improvements to Wayback and its reach have happened over the last year, with connections to Wikipedia, Cloudflare and Brave, but the day when you go to an old Flash-driven site and have it “just work” in Wayback is going to be a significant time in the future.

Which brings up another tangent:

Flash Interfaces to the Web Were The Worst Idea

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the fad of making Flash boot up and be the “menu” or selections for a website were unusually cruel to anyone in need of portability or accessibility. What’s thought of as “Web 1.0” (HTML files and simple flat files provided to servers) was extremely good for screen readers and keyboard shortcuts, providing important access to blind or disabled users, as well as expanding the amount of devices and systems that could use the Web. Flash took a lot of that away in the name of.. well, Flashiness. As this small burst of interest in Flash has occurred, a not-insignificant amount of people dependent on accessibility have said “Good Riddance to Flash”, and they’re entirely right. Captured inside little boxes on Internet Archive as displays in a museum, they work fine enough. But the Web should never have depended on Flash for navigation.

When Flash Is At Its Best, There’s Nothing Like It On The Internet

As people have been sharing the Flash animations they’ve found on the site, as well as providing their own additions, jewels have been coming to the forefront. Most inspiring have been artists and creators who did work 15 or 20 years ago and have been rifling through floppies and stored ZIP files to upload to our collection.

Watching this as they come in, it strikes us anew how much effort, artistic and otherwise, went into a good Flash animation. Crafting custom artwork, adding little touches and flair, and truly bringing something new into the world… this was the promise of Flash and every time someone in the modern age stumbles on a classic for the first time, all the effort is worth it.

Long Live Flash!

Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

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Great news for everyone concerned about the Flash end of life planned for end of 2020: The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection.

Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed. While Ruffle’s compatibility with Flash is less than 100%, it will play a very large portion of historical Flash animation in the browser, at both a smooth and accurate rate.

We have a showcase of the hand-picked best or representative Flash items in this collection. If you want to try your best at combing through a collection of over 1,000 flash items uploaded so far, here is the link.

You will not need to have a flash plugin installed, and the system works in all browsers that support Webassembly.

For many people: See you later! Enjoy the Flash stuff!

Others might get this far down and ask “And what exactly is Flash?” or even “I haven’t thought about Flash in a very long time.” For both of these groups, let’s talk about Flash and what it represented in the 1990s and 2000s.

A Short History of of the Rise of Flash

In the early 1990s, web browsers were incredibly powerful compared to what came before – with simple files written in HTML that could generate documents that were mixing images and text, as well as providing links to other websites, it felt like nothing for computers had ever had this level of ease and flexibility. It really did change everything.

But people didn’t stay in a state of wonder.

It quickly became a request, then a demand, then a mission to allow animation, sound, and greater audio/video flexibility into webpages. A huge range of companies were on a mission to make this happen. While looking back it might seem like one or two tried, it was actually a bunch of companies, but out of the wreckage of experimentation and effort came a couple big winners: Shockwave and Flash.

Flash had once been called SmartSketch in 1993, which was rewritten as FutureWave, and was actually a challenger to Shockwave until purchased by Macromedia, who handled creation software and playback software for both products.

Flash had many things going for it – the ability to compress down significantly made it a big advantage in the dial-up web era. It could also shift playback quality to adjust to a wide variety of machines. Finally, it was incredibly easy to use – creation software allowed a beginner or novice to make surprisingly complicated and flexible graphic and sound shows that ran beautifully on web browsers without requiring deep knowledge of individual operating systems and programming languages.

From roughly 2000 to 2005, Flash was the top of the heap for a generation of creative artists, animators and small studios. Literally thousands and thousands of individual works were released on the web. Flash could also be used to make engaging menu and navigation systems for webpages, and this was used by many major and minor players on the Web to bring another layer of experience to their users. (There were, of course, detractors and critics of use of Flash this way – accessibility was a major issue and the locked-in nature of Flash as a menu system meant it was extremely brittle and prone to errors on systems as time went on.)

This period was the height of Flash. Nearly every browser could be expected to have a “Flash Plugin” to make it work, thousands of people were experimenting with Flash to make art and entertainment, and an audience of millions, especially young ones, looked forward to each new release.

However, cracks appeared on the horizon.

The Downfall of Flash

Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2005, who renamed Flash to Adobe Flash and began extensive upgrades and changes to the Flash environment. Flash became a near operating system in itself. But these upgrades brought significant headaches and security problems. Backwards compatibility became an issue, as well as losing interest by novice creators. Social networks and platforms became notably hostile to user-created artworks being loaded in their walled gardens.

It all came to a head in 2010, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs released an open letter called “Thoughts on Flash”. The letter was criticized and received strong condemnation from Adobe, and Apple ultimately backed off their plan (although work was done to support alternate tools).

The call-out, even if not initially successful, ended the party.

In November of 2011, Adobe announced it was ending support of Flash for mobile web browsers, and in 2017, announced it was discontinuing Flash altogether for 2020.

Flash’s final death-blow was the introduction of HTML 5 in 2014. With its ground-up acknowledgement of audio and video items being as important as text and images, HTML 5 had significant support for animation, sound and video at the browser level. This mean increased speed, compatibility, and less concern about a specific plugin being installed and from what source – audio/video items just worked and Flash, while still used in some quarters and certainly needed to view older works, stopped being the go-to approach for web designers.

What Are We Losing When We Lose Flash?

Like any container, Flash itself is not as much of a loss as all the art and creativity it held. Without a Flash player, flash animations don’t work. It’s not like an image or sound file where a more modern player could still make the content accessible in the modern era. If there’s no Flash Player, there’s nothing like Flash, which is a tragedy.

As you’ll see in the collection at the Archive, Flash provided a gateway for many young creators to fashion near-professional-level games and animation, giving them the first steps to a later career. Companies created all sorts of unique works that became catchphrases and memes for many, and memories they can still recall. Flash also led to unusual side-paths like “advergames”, banners that played full games to entice you to buy a product. Clones of classic arcade games abounded, as well as truly twisted and unique experiences unfettered by needing a budget or committee to come to reality. A single person working in their home could hack together a convincing program, upload it to a huge clearinghouse like Newgrounds, and get feedback on their work. Some creators even made entire series of games, each improving on the last, until they became full professional releases on consoles and PCs.

Why We Emulate Flash

The Internet Archive has moved aggressively in making a whole range of older software run in the browser over the past decade. We’ve done this project, The Emularity, because one of our fundamental tenets is Access Drives Preservation; being able to immediately experience a version of the software in your browser, while not perfect or universal, makes it many times more likely that support will arrive to preserve these items.

Flash is in true danger of sinking beneath the sea, because of its depending on a specific, proprietary player to be available. As Adobe Flash is discontinued, many operating systems will automatically strip the player out of the browser and system. (As of this writing, it is already coming to fruition a month before the end-of-life deadline.) More than just dropping support, the loss of the player means the ability of anyone to experience Flash is dropping as well. Supporting Ruffle is our line in the sand from oblivion’s gaze.

Credit Where Due

This project is by no means an Internet Archive-only production, although assistance from Dan Brooks, James Baicoianu, Tracey Jacquith, Samuel Stoller and Hank Bromley played a huge part.

The Ruffle Team has been working on their emulator for months and improving it daily. (Ruffle welcomes new contributors for the project at ruffle.rs.)

The BlueMaxima Flashpoint Project has been working for years to provide a desktop solution to playable web animation and multimedia, including Flash. Clocking in at nearly 500 gigabytes of data and growing, the project is located here: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

A shout-out to Guy Sowden, who first drafted the inclusion of Ruffle in the Emularity before it was refined elsewhere; your efforts set the ball rolling.

And finally, a huge thanks to the community of Flash creators whose creative and wonderful projects over the years led to inspiration in its preservation. We hope you’ll like your new, permanent home.

Bonus Section: Adding Your Own Flash Animations to the Archive!

For the creators, artists and collectors who have .swf files from the era of Flash and would like to see them uploaded to the Archive and working like our collection, here’s some simple instructions to do so.

Please note: Ruffle is a developing emulator, and compatibility with SWF files is continually improving but is not perfect. They have provided a test environment here to see if your SWF file will work. Please take the time to test before uploading to the Archive.

The Archive looks for one mediatype setting (software) and two metadata pairs set (emulator and emulator_ext) to know whether an item can be run in the Ruffle emulator. Here are those two settings:

emulator set to ruffle-swf
emulator_ext set to swf

The emulator only works with a single SWF file at the moment, which should have no spaces in it. With all these conditions in place, the swf item should be offered up to play and the emulator should work.

When uploading to the Archive, accurate or complete descriptions, title, creation date, are all optional but strongly encouraged to provide context for users. Additionally, if you create an image file (jpg, png or gif) and name it itemname_screenshot.ext,, like itemname_screenshot.png, it will become the official screenshot and thumbnail for the item. Notice how we named things here:

https://archive.org/download/flash_loituma

We’re here to help you if you run into any snags or issues. There’s no other location on the internet that does things quite this way, so if you do run into problems, feel free to mail Jason Scott about tech support and whatever assistance can be given will be provided.

Update: Read about how this new adventure of Flash has had an effect on the Web.

Where Your Donation Goes

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As an independent nonprofit library, the Internet Archive is powered by donations from individual users, and every little bit helps. But have you ever wondered how your donations are used? Or what impact your giving has on our work? The contributions we receive are crucial to continuing our mission—here are a few ways they help!

Infrastructure

The Internet Archive builds and maintains all of its own infrastructure, rather than contracting it out. Right now we’re holding more than 70 petabytes of data, including millions of books, hundreds of millions of webpages, and thousands of collections focused on everything from video gaming to opera music. That’s a lot of storage space!

The donations we receive help us purchase servers, provide bandwidth, and pay the electricity bills, so that anyone, anywhere, can access our resources. This year our systems have seen more use than ever before, and we were able to make some upgrades thanks to the generosity of our patrons. Your donations allow us to serve more than 1.5 million visitors every day!

Staff

All those servers need people to build and maintain them. The website needs programmers to develop it, the collections need archivists to organize them, and our patrons need librarians to answer their questions. We employ 150 people around the world to scan books, build software, maintain data centers, acquire new materials, and find ways to make the archive better for our users. That’s a small staff for one of the world’s top 300 websites—and in 2020, they’ve stretched even farther by working remotely to keep the archive online. Most of our employees could make more at a profit-driven company, but they’ve chosen instead to work at a nonprofit where every dollar counts and the mission comes first.

Our Projects

Most importantly, the generosity of our users is used to fund our work! These projects include the Wayback Machine, a crucial tool for preserving the history of the web. In an era of disinformation and misinformation, having documentation of what’s being said and who’s saying it is absolutely critical—and your donations help us keep the record straight.

We also use patron contributions to run the Open Library, a free, digital lending library of over 4 million eBooks that can be read in a browser or downloaded for reading off-line. It costs us just $20 to acquire, digitize, and preserve a book forever, making it available to readers around the world—and thanks to the contributions from our patrons, we’re always adding to the stacks!

Other projects that your donations fund include the Decentralized Web initiative, the TV News Archive, and our preservation of open access journals. We also use donations to help acquire, transport, and digitize special collections—such as ephemera from the Tytell Typewriter Company, the Marygrove College Library, or a dizzying array of 78 rpm records.

How to Help

If you’d like to make a donation to the Internet Archive, we’d greatly appreciate your support! Your contribution helps us survive, thrive, and keep growing. In addition to our online donations portal, there are several other options for how you can give. If you would like to make a securities donation or receive information about estate planning, email joy@archive.org. You can even donate using cryptocurrency!

If you’re unable to donate at the moment—or if you’ve already given—there are still ways you can lend a hand. Using Amazon Smile and setting the Internet Archive as your preferred charity will mean that we get a small donation every time you make a purchase. If your employer matches charitable contributions, you can easily double your impact—check your company here! And if you’re looking for more small ways you can help out, check out this blog post on how to make a difference right now without leaving the house.

We’re so grateful for each and every person who chooses to contribute to us. Thanks for your support, and enjoy the archive!

The Rutgers University Poster Project

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Rutgers University and Internet Archive have collaborated to create a limited edition series of risograph posters. Facilitated by Amir Esfahani, Director of Special Art Projects at the Internet Archive, and Mindy Seu, Assistant Professor of Design in the Mason Gross School of the Arts, 14 students in the course Design Practicum gathered unique collections on the Internet Archive and then adapted their findings into an 11×17 graphic. These were printed on a risograph by the Brooklyn-based studio TXT Books. 

The first 40 people to sign up will receive a packet of these tabloid-size posters. Please sign up here! https://forms.gle/72sX8F8vM8sCBDwo6 (Please note: We can only provide shipment to people in the United States). 

The 14 Projects

Jeepneys – 1950s to Present by Pauline Yanes

Portfolio: https://paulineyanes.smvi.co/

Collection: https://archive.org/details/jeepneys-1950s-to-Present

After World War II, many military Jeeps were left in the Philippines by U.S. troops. These Jeeps were decorated and modified to hold more passengers. Since then, Jeepneys have become the most popular form of transportation in the country. This collection showcases Jeepneys in the Philippines starting from the 1950s, exploring a visual history of this symbol of Filipino culture.

Chinese Calligraphers of the Tang Dynasty 618CE—907CE by Zhongxuan Lin

Collection: https://archive.org/details/chinese-caligraphers-of-the-tang-dynasty-618-907

This collection includes the works of eight famous Chinese calligraphers born in Tang Dynasty. All of the images are photographs of the artwork written on paper or etched on monuments. 

Wartime Utility Furniture by Xinyi Huang

Collection: https://archive.org/details/war-time-utility-furniture

Utility furniture was first produced by the United Kingdom’s government during World War II due to the shortage of materials and usage rations.

Nintendo Box Art — USA vs. Japan by Derek Li

Portfolio: https://artfiles.rutgers.edu/~lid@art.rutgers.edu/projects/Arizona/index.html

Collection: https://archive.org/details/nintendo-game-box-art-usa-vs-japan

For this collection of comparisons between the USA’s and Japan’s box art for specific Nintendo games, it can be observed that the advent of global releases has removed much of the differences in box artwork with newer releases possessing nearly identical covers between the American and Japanese versions.

Souvenir Spoons Collected by The Fajardo-Reyes Family by Alexa Reyes

Portfolio: https://alexafreyes.github.io/

Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/alexareyesart/

Collection: https://archive.org/details/souvenir-objects-collected-by-the-fajardo-reyes-family

A growing collection of spoons gathered over several years by a first generation Filipino-American family from New Jersey. Each souvenir utensil has its own story, own memory, and own journey from traveling anywhere between across the country or across the ocean. 

Qing Dynasty Wealth Gap by Yuchao Wang

Collection: https://archive.org/details/qing-dynasty-wealth-gap

These photos display the extreme wealth gap between the Qing Dynasty’s upper class and civilians, revealing an invisible piece of history typically unseen in textbooks.

Fictional Languages (in video games) by Sarah Poon

Collection: https://archive.org/details/constructed-language

Video games develop fictional languages that cannot be used anywhere else in reality. Some languages are only audio-based instead of having a traditional visual alphabet. 

Rap Album Design 1993-2020 by Sebastian Lijo

Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/lijo.seb/ 

Collection: https://archive.org/details/rap-album-design-1993-2020

This collection was made to highlight the progression of graphic design on rap album covers. It begins in 1993, right in the middle of the golden era of rap, and extends to our current day. Two covers per year are shown in order of their appearance on the highest first-week sales charts.

Double Bass Archives by Yogini Borgaonkar

Collection: https://archive.org/details/double-bass-archives

The Double Bass Archives includes performances of classical compositions and each piece’s correlating sheet music. This collection acts as a resource, providing a deep dive into the sound, documentation, and physicality of the Double Bass.

Steven Universe Monopoly by Nicholas Plyler

Portfolio: art.rutgers.edu/~plyler

Collection: https://archive.org/details/steven-universe-monopoly    

This collection is meant to archive every single unique piece that comes from the Steven Universe Monopoly board game. These unique pieces can be used to traverse and visit iconic Steven Universe locations.

Horror Movie Posters of Dario Argento by Steve Tomori

Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/stevetomori_design   

Collection: https://archive.org/details/italian-horror-covers-by-director-dario-argento

This collection consists of horror movie posters from the director Dario Argento. It features Italian and American posters as well as some alternate versions. These movies were directed, and some even produced, by Dario Argento and span over decades.

Strobridge Lithographing Company’s Circus Posters — 1890s–1950s by Marinelle Manansala

Portfolio: marinellem.com    

Collection:https://archive.org/details/strobridge-lithographing-company-circus-posters-1890s-1950s

Circus posters were created by Cincinnati’s Strobridge Lithographing Company, printed in the 1890s through the 1950s. These posters focus on attracting the audience by depicting the unusual main acts in a dynamic composition. By 1900, they were known as the “Tiffany of Printers” since they had become one of the largest and most popular printing companies in the United States.

Transparencies by Anna Pittas

Portfolio: annapittas.com

Social Media: instagram.com/annapittasphotography

Collection: https://archive.org/details/kodachrome-mounted-color-transparencies

A collection of Kodachrome mounted color transparencies were taken between 1950-1970 by members of the Clarke family. The photos are mostly family photos, capturing fun memories.

Covid-19 Street Art by Catie Esposito 

Social Media: instagram.com/artbycatie

Collection: https://archive.org/details/covid-19-street-art  

A living collection of street art in the U.S.A. focused around the Coronavirus Pandemic. These works of art are often temporary, so I am attempting to document these murals as I see them, either in person or online. This is an ongoing project until the ‘pandemic’ is finally over.