Brewster Kahle Asks Google For Their Database

from the pass-it-on... dept

The San Jose Mercury News is running a somewhat random article about Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive. While he's been profiled many times before, the one interesting tidbit to slip out this time is that Kahle has asked Google to donate their database to help the archive. He's asking for a six-month old version of the database, to avoid competitive problems. The Internet Archive only publishes material 6-months old or older at this point anyway. Kahle is trying to appeal to Google's claim to want to make the world a better place, but you have to wonder if Google is holding back, in part, due to Kahle's involvement with open source search engine, Nutch. In somewhat related news, the Inquirer has a story about how the Internet Archive needed to get a special exception to the DMCA in order to keep copying certain software files to preserve the software from ending up on obsolete storage systems. I thought this exception was granted a while back, but maybe they're just starting to complain now about the fact they need to go back every 3 years to ask for permission again to save digital items for the sake of history.