Could the future of libraries as we’ve known them be completely different? Our guests this week say so. Megapublishers are suing the Internet Archive, perhaps best known for its Wayback Machine, to redefine e-books as legally different from paper books. A difference in how they are classified would mean sweeping changes for the way libraries operate. Brewster Kahle is a digital librarian at the Internet Archive. Kyle Courtney is a lawyer, librarian, director of copyright and information policy for Harvard Library. He’s the co-founder of Library Futures, which aims to empower the digital future for America’s libraries. They join to discuss what’s animating the lawsuit, information as a public good and the consequences should the publishers ultimately prevail.
This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Brewster Kahle: It’s really hard for people to fathom that all of these forces, political, judicial legislative, funding are all going against a tradition that built America out of a set of immigrants and brought us together to be able to know how to work as a populace. And all of that is in well, some of it is going to be judged again by an appellate group in lower Manhattan and we’ll see what it is they decide towards the fate of libraries as we know them.
Kyle Courtney: It’s a slippery slope into a licensed only culture in which libraries cannot exist and mission this challenge. I do agree. A lot of people say, oh, this is just about the Internet Archives open libraries program. It’s a narrow focus. I don’t think that’s true. It’s about libraries entering and being supported in the digital space and through the use of either licensing or litigation. That’s a one-two punch, really will threaten the library mission now and in the future.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes. There is this news recently that I saw that just brought me up short, put my heart in my throat, which was nothing with life or death stakes, just that the mtvnews.com archives of 20 years had disappeared off the Internet. It had been removed by MTV’s parent company Paramount for reasons that were a little unclear, I think some financial decision or maybe site reorganization. But for a one-time freelance writer like myself, the notion of your work being on the Internet and then being taken off is really unnerving.
I remember back when I started freelancing, I was writing for the “Chicago Reader,” which didn’t really even have an online version. It was just paper. I would go and pick up the paper version. And I got myself this kind of like leather book that, you know, has like the cellophane and you put the clippings in, and this was a big ritual for me. When I published a new piece, go get the “Chicago Reader,” bring it home, clip it out, put it in my clips book. And then at a certain point, you know, everything was online and there was some notion that we had back then that the Internet is forever, people would say.
But the Internet is not forever. So one of the only ways the Internet is forever is an institution known as the Internet Archive, which does a bunch of stuff, which we’ll talk about in this hour, but runs the Wayback Machine you might’ve seen, which basically archives the Internet in real time. And so the Wayback Machine presumably will have the archives of mtvnews.com. And the Internet Archive is fascinating and important I think because it’s one of two pillars of what I would call the old pre-commercial and now non-commercial Internet.
Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, neither of which are for-profit enterprises. They embody the notion of a non-commercial collaborative civic vision of the Internet as a storehouse of free and publicly accessible knowledge that people collaborate on. And that pre-commercial vision of the Internet Archive, which runs the Wayback Machine, but also does a bunch of other stuff we’ll talk about has come into conflict with commercial visions of knowledge and intellectual property in the form of a lawsuit, which has been brought by a bunch of publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, Penguin Random House who is going to publish my next book I should note, full disclosure.
They sued the Internet Archives in June of 2020, because Internet Archive digitizes physical books and makes them available to people to loan. We’ll talk about how that loaning works. And the publisher said, look, you can’t do this. They said it was willful digital piracy on an industrial scale with the program the Internet Archive runs called the Open Library. And the publishers included in their complaint that the Internet Archives did not have licensing agreements with them, nor does it pay its authors.
So a federal district judge found in favor of the publishers in summary judgment ruling last year, and said that the use of copyrighted material that merely repackages or republishes the original is unlikely to be deemed fair use. Fair use, of course, is the carve out for a copyrighted material. And the Internet Archive has built a collection of more than 3 million books. It’s purchased them in print or received donations. And patrons of the digital library could borrow up to 10 books simultaneously for two weeks, each just the way you’d borrow physical book.
And the Internet Archive says, look, this free e-book lending program is fair use, and it’s a controlled digital lending practice. The publishers say, no, this thing you’re doing controlled digital lending is a frontal assault, I’m quoting here, “on the foundational copyright principle that rights shoulders, exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work. A principle that has spawned the broad diversity in formats of books, music, movies, television, music, the consumers enjoy today,” okay.
So that’s part of the topic of today. We’re going to talk to some folks from the Internet Archive, but it’s a deeper conversation about the commercial versus non-commercial Internet, about what fair use is, about the notion of a public intellectual commons. And we should note that this conversation was recorded on June 26, 2024, which was actually just a few days before there was the oral arguments in the Internet Archive’s appeals before a three-judge panel to defend its Open Library controlled digital lending practice.
Again, I want to be sort of bending over backwards to be fair here because we’re only listening to one side of the litigants, defendants actually, in this lawsuit. So just to lay this out, but I’m really, really fascinated and obsessed with the notion of reviving, expanding non-commercial models for digital life.
So it was really enlightening and energizing to have this conversation about a case study in how that’s playing out right now with Brewster Kahle, who’s a digital librarian at the Internet Archive, intimately involved in the creation of the Wayback Machine, a founder of the enterprise, and Kyle Courtney, who is a lawyer, librarian, director of copyright information policy for Harvard Library. He’s co-founder of Library Futures, which aims to empower the digital future for America’s libraries. Here’s our conversation.
Brewster, let me start with you and just take me through your background and how you, I mean, you’re one of the founders, creators, right?
Brewster Kahle: Yeah, I’m the founder of the Internet Archive.
Chris Hayes: You’re the guy, right.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah, we started in 1996, and it took us that long because we had to get a lot of the rest of the Internet, like it was the ARPANET when I got going. So we had to actually get the Internet going. We had to have computers and search engines, we had the publishers online. But once I helped, I mean, I didn’t do all of that, but I helped go and get, you know, “New York Times’” first website up, the first “Wall Street Journal” website up, then we could build the library. So in 1996, we turned to build the library. And it’s been great. We’ve been archiving web pages, but also television, books, music, video, all your old flash games, all of that stuff.
Chris Hayes: So just tell me about yourself personally, like how you found your way to this work. You’re obviously tech savvy, early adopter kind of person. Like what was your first connection to the Internet?
Brewster Kahle: Oh, I’m a geek. So I started to at MIT, but I’m sort of in the tail end of the hippies, right? The sort of like, what can you do with your life that would be a good thing to do? And the idea of building the digital library of Alexandria seemed like a great idea in 1980. We’ve been promising the Library of Congress on your desktop for 35 years before that, starting with Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. We’ve been promising this. It’s like, how hard could it be? And technically, it turns out to not be that hard, but boy, it’s been a long road. We’re not even there yet.
Chris Hayes: I like this idea of the Alexandria Library of the Internet. Like, where did the idea come from and how do you start actually doing it?
Brewster Kahle: It started with a technical conversation. We knew that digital publishing was going to happen. I mean, this is before the Macintosh. So it’s like, we knew all this stuff was going to go online.
Chris Hayes: What years was this?
Brewster Kahle: We’re talking 1980.
Chris Hayes: Okay. So it goes back that far that you were thinking about this in these --
Brewster Kahle: Yeah, I’m old. But, you know, it wasn’t new to me. The idea of building access to all the information in the world, having that all at your fingertips has been in the air since the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all the published works of humankind available to you was the promise when you walked into a library. And then you (ph) slogged your bones. When I was growing up, you slogged your bones in the library. They said, we have everything. And if we don’t have it here, we’ll get it for you from interlibrary loan.
And that was how the American sort of Carnegie Library ethos of America and it was so important for educating people, for getting people ready for elections. A lot of it came out of the progressive era to go and try to get it so that when people are doing direct elections, they’re educated citizenry. All of that momentum was the world that I grew up in. And I had a new trick. I knew technology.
And I also knew how long it would be before we would be able to have all of the books in the Library of Congress online and then all the movies online and all lectures at Harvard and anywhere else online. And you could just plot it out. So those conversations with Richard Feynman and Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, Stephen Wolfram. We just charted it out and it was like, this isn’t that hard. Let’s just go build it.
And so that is, I don’t know, some of the early ethos of the Internet. It wasn’t uncommon, but it also sort of led some of those things. By 1996, it’s still before Wikipedia, it was before Google, it was way before YouTube. We knew that we needed to go and take the wonderful things that people were going and putting onto their websites. They were offering and sharing and putting unbelievable things and it was all getting lost. The average life of a web page is only 100 days --
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Brewster Kahle: -- before it’s changed or deleted.
And in the old days, publishers would go and publish things and they’d be bought by libraries and put in many places. So even when the publisher goes away, because they always do, there’s libraries that will be there that will store and keep the real precious things, which is the works of humankind, alive. And that’s what we went to try to build with the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive.
Chris Hayes: And that incorporated like officially in 1996?
Brewster Kahle: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And how --
Brewster Kahle: That’s when we started crawling the web with the Smithsonian Institution.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So how did you build it institutionally? Like, was it a 501(c)(3)? How did it work as an institution?
Brewster Kahle: Nonprofit from the very beginning because this is everybody else’s stuff, right? We are custodians of everyone else’s materials, starting with the presidential election of 1996. You should see these old websites, man. They’re really critty-crufty, but they’re like the first bumper stickers in the early 1950s is the way the Smithsonian saw it. And we saw it as the beginning of the library of not just the elite that can publish books, but everyone’s words, everyone’s blogs, though there weren’t blogs yet. But every --
Chris Hayes: Web diaries.
Brewster Kahle: -- city sites, web diaries, all of these things that were happening at that time as people were sharing up a storm because they could.
Chris Hayes: So walk me through technically what the project was. Like, you said that you figured it out technically before you started doing it as an institution. Before we get to that, were you raising money? You have donors, you have members, did the Smithsonian pay you for the service? Like how did it work financially?
Brewster Kahle: No, they didn’t pay us. I got lucky because along this route, I was helping building the publishing systems to get the publishers on board so they could start making money by publishing on the net. And that was bought by AOL. It was called Waze. It was the system before the World Wide Web. So that’s, I guess, why I’m probably in the Internet Hall of Fame is I did the earliest systems for publishers. And then that was put on AOL to help publishers.
Then once I was done and I left, then the idea was like, what’s the most ephemeral of media? We said, let’s do the web. And so we made little crawlers and these crawlers are little robots. They’re programs that basically click every link on every web page and it just downloads a page and remembers it and then makes the file out of it and then finds the links and adds it to the queue. And then it clicks on that one and then finds the links on it and it’s a queue.
And it just goes round and round and round and round. And we collected a copy of the web every two months, a snapshot, snapshot, snapshot, snapshot, starting then. It’s gotten much more complicated now, but we’re collecting about 300 million web pages every day, about a billion URLs every day now.
Chris Hayes: I have to say, back in 2002 or ‘03, I started a blog. This is pre-WordPress, so I had to hand code it in HTML.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah. God bless.
Chris Hayes: And put it up. And I had a thought a while ago, like, I wonder if that exists anywhere, and sure enough, on the Wayback Machine, I’m not going to tell you the name of this blog because I don’t want anyone to go read what I was writing when I was 23. It’s fine. It’s nothing like offensive.
Brewster Kahle: Okay.
Chris Hayes: It’s all perfectly defensible, but I was just a little baby.
Brewster Kahle: Well, you started out with the MTV News and we got that for you. So MTV, we think we have it completely, but we also have the newspapers in Turkey and Russia and all these others that have been basically taken down with no warning.
Chris Hayes: From a technical standpoint, it seems like a ton of data. And then you have, this is all very text-based, mostly text-based, text and image, still image when you’re when you start doing this in ‘96. Then you have the dawn of video and video comes to dominate huge portions of the Internet. I think it’s probably, if you think about social media --
Brewster Kahle: It’s huge.
Chris Hayes: It’s the dominant media now. And that seems like an order of magnitude change in how you would do things and how you would save it. Like, do you start to have constraints on what you could hold?
Brewster Kahle: Thank God that these guys are working so hard to make hard drives bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So we have to replace all the hard drives every five years and then we have to reel in a new rack every few weeks to be able to keep up with the unbelievable amount of material. So we collect about a billion URLs every day. And a lot of those URLs now are images.
Chris Hayes: It’s so nuts.
Brewster Kahle: It’s nuts. People love this stuff. They are sharing up a storm. The idea that people will only do things for money is just not true.
Chris Hayes: No.
Brewster Kahle: People will do things because they can get some positive feedback from each other and share where they can, as long as it doesn’t cost them any money. So why don’t we make it so that giving things away doesn’t cost you? And that was sort of the premise of libraries and the Internet Archive.
Chris Hayes: This point, just to go back, I’d like to hear some of your thoughts just to sync up with the monologue about the Internet I fell in love with, and again, I always sound like an old man talking about, you know, kids these days and in my youth, whatever. But the Internet I fell in love with is largely non-commercial enterprise in which people were motivated by all kinds of things, some of which were noble and some of which were base. I mean, you know, humans are humans.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But almost none of it was pecuniary, right? So people might want to, you know, get into a flame war because they wanted to assert domination or they were incorrigible contrarians and like to argue or they might want to share really cool stuff because creating cool stuff and showing it off as fun, the whole sort of spectrum of human motivation.
But it was not commercialized and it was not done explicitly for profit, and it wasn’t done for profit at scale in which engineers are working very hard to figure out how to hack people’s attention such that you can maximize monetization. And I would like you to talk a little bit about why you think that’s an important ethos to preserve, because that is part of what you’re doing. And if it is an important ethos to preserve.
Brewster Kahle: There’s a role on all sides of this. And so most people just want to be heard. They want to have some recognition. They don’t want to feel like they’ve been taken advantage of. And we develop search engines to help people, guide people to these even obscure topics to go and find your people no matter where they are in the world. Fabulous. But you also have people that wanted to make money by publishing on the net. And that’s not bad.
Chris Hayes: No.
Brewster Kahle: As long as if they’re not exclusionary about it or if they’re not sort of this platform that’s trying to control a whole media type, then that’s the controlling aspect that is really causing so much trouble out there, is not so much that, you know, a kid wants to sell his song off of his garage band. Actually, it’s really hard to do that. And that’s, I think, one of the faults is we made peer-to-peer selling so difficult and we basically have to sign up to go and put on iTunes or Amazon or the like.
We’re trying to make a more decentralized web so that you can go and have people go and participate in their communities, sell a little bit if they can make some money off of it. And, you know, most people aren’t going to buy your rock and roll song, sorry, but at least it’s a possibility. And let’s keep it so that there’s no central points of control. And we have got people vying for monopoly control now in such a way that it’s really debilitating.
So while we’re trying to keep up with the social media, some of those are very locked down. So you can’t even keep a record of it, even that’s sometimes the only way politicians are going and communicating their points of view. That’s not good.
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s interesting. So there are parts of the Internet on platforms that are essentially closed to the archiving that you’re doing.
Brewster Kahle: Yes, but some of them are opening up. Reddit just yesterday went and said, yeah, we’re closing up to the AI guys, but the Internet Archive is A-okay, which we’re kind of happy about and other research organizations. So I think that going and showing that there is a role for libraries that’s different from Babylon is a good thing. But the control aspects and I wouldn’t say it’s just the platforms that, you know, you’re normally talking about the Internet platforms, but the publisher platforms and the back ends of these things, the television networks that are very closed, the book publishers, the magazine, the academic journals just so closed.
Chris Hayes: So you’re saying when you say closed, what do you mean by that technically?
Brewster Kahle: That it doesn’t operate the same way it used to, that basically libraries and people would buy things in the old days, they preserve them and then they would make them available to themselves or their communities through lending and they’d interoperate. But what we’ve got now is organizations going and saying, no, we’re going to want to watch every page turn. We’re going to want to be able to take that thing down. We want to be able to change that e-book.
We want to go and make it so libraries don’t own anything in the digital world. That’s the problem. And there’s been lots of talk of the social media networks and the issues around that, you know, true issues. But I don’t think we’re really looking at some of the back end organizations that are exerting a level of control because they can in this digital world for surveillance and ultimately being able to change and delete things without anybody having a record of it. No libraries are allowed.
Chris Hayes: Right. So if we think broadly, not just I mean, so when we started talking about this and when the way I think about the Wayback Machine specifically, which is just one part of the Internet Archive, right, is this all this sort of digital ephemera, you know, someone’s LiveJournal, right, someone’s MySpace page, someone’s political blog.
When you start moving up to entities that are big corporate interests that are producing intellectual property that they want to charge people for, which, again, as you said, is all well and good, there’s a different set of questions, right. So, let’s talk about a show that streamed. This is a great example. The archivist in you, the librarian in you says what should be possible is that the library buys that show. It then owns it the way that a library owns a copy of Shakespeare’s completed works or a library owns the bestselling novel, it just came out, you know, by Miranda July and then can lend it to people, right?
Brewster Kahle: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what I’m hearing from you is that the entities are like, no, we’re not going to sell you our show for you to just have archived and lend to people we want to control if anyone sees. We want complete control of that model, we’re not going to abide basically.
Brewster Kahle: You got it. That’s exactly what’s going on now. So libraries are not allowed from the big publishers. The small publishers are still, you know, in there trying to be, you know, publishers that we love. But the big corporate monopoly companies are basically making it so that libraries cannot own a digital e-book.
So when you borrow an e-book from your local library, you think you are. It’s actually going and just being redirected into the publisher’s databases and they are surveilling everything about it and they’re changing and deleting those books at will. And so this is a future that is absolutely dystopian and counter to what it is we should be able to do now. We just want these people to sell. And it’s not it’s not happening.
Chris Hayes: Right. You’re not saying give it to us. You’re saying we want to buy these things from you the way that a library buys things and then make it available.
Brewster Kahle: Absolutely. And what libraries do is they often not just buy the blockbusters, but they buy the local content from the local authors and all of that’s being shut down and shuttled into these very few platforms And with the surveillance thing, it’s, you know, there’s a long history of libraries getting surveilled and then their patrons getting rounded up and bad things happening to them based on the books they’ve read. This isn’t good.
So the libraries have always been a bastion of privacy. It’s part of our ethics. And so how do we go and move into this digital world in such a way we have many winners? So we have many authors, many publishers, many bookstores, many libraries and everyone a reader. That’s the world that we can live in. But it’s not the thing that we’re seeing happen at the tops of these mega corporations.
Chris Hayes: That, I think, brings us to some of the legal issues the Internet Archive is facing. And maybe I’ll bring in Kyle Courtney here, who I know is also sort of read in on this. So a bunch of publishers have sued the Internet Archive. And Kyle, what is the lawsuit about? What are they contending?
Kyle Courtney: So ultimately, I think the lawsuit is about to prevent libraries from being able to loan in the digital space now and in the future. Right. So if we imagine that loaning has always happened at the circulation desk. When it moves into digital space, this is what Brewster was referring to, they say, no, we haven’t sold you anything. We’re going to force you into renting your collections with these terms that basically eviscerate the library mission.
So the case is about a methodology of lending called controlled digital lending, which I co-wrote in a paper in 2018. And it’s been endorsed by national library organizations, regional library consortia, specific library systems, individual librarians, legal experts. Ultimately, though, it comes down to this. We are being told, libraries, the royal, we are being told we’re not capable of entering the digital space with our same mission that we had.
Now, of course, the library mission relies on the ability to acquire creative works, which, by the way, serves the economic purpose of copyright, right? We buy the stuff, right. This is not free. We’re spending money, millions and millions of dollars, and then distribute those works to the public, right. I always think this is a constitutional narrative, right. We’re promoting the progress of science and the useful arts by distributing those materials to this. And so that I think that the library loaning programs are part of this copyright cycle.
Now, this method called controlled digital lending, which, again, digitally replicates what happens at the circulation desk, is more efficient. It’s less ableist. It’s good for folks that are remote, that can’t get to the library, senior citizens, et cetera, especially during our pandemic closures. But it’s through the lens of something called fair use, which is a copyright exception. And I’m sure that your show has heard about fair use before. I’m sure you have heard about fair use before. But this is basically saying, hey, copyright doesn’t mean total control of the copyrighted work. It does not.
It is some control, certainly, but there are generous exceptions granted to users, to patrons, to libraries to be able to circulate those materials in service of that promoting progress of science and the useful arts. And again, I want to be very clear, libraries and their systems represent the commitment to both the economic and access parts of the copyright cycle.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: All right. So just tell me how does digital lending work under the scheme that you would like it to work? And what don’t they like about? Like, I still am having a hard time with this. What do you want to do and what do they not want you to do?
Kyle Courtney: Yeah. So, imagine this. So, libraries spent millions and millions of dollars of collections that are in print, that are on our shelves, right. We have those books. We have paid for them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Kyle Courtney: We control them.
Chris Hayes: You own them.
Kyle Courtney: We own them. We should be able to lend them without permission.
Chris Hayes: Right. The publisher that you don’t have to check with the publisher.
Kyle Courtney: Right, we do not. You can lend a book, yes, a thousand times and you never pay the rights holder again, right. You’re lending that book and you’re making sure it stays. You know, you bind the glue on the board. You know, you make sure that book lasts. That’s the way public libraries especially get a return on investment in their communities. And they’re holding on to those books.
Many of those books never made the jump to digital, right. Maybe they’re not popular. Maybe they didn’t do well. But they were important for preservation and access purposes. So the controlled digital lending methodology says, okay, we take that book we bought and we digitize it and then we hide it away so it cannot be loaned. It’s not on the shelf. It’s not in a room, and we hide it away.
Then we use that surrogate digital version to loan to one person at a time, just like we do at the SERC (ph) desk, except it’s digital. And then that person reads it, keeps it for two weeks, three hours, whatever the loaning period is, and then it automatically returns back to the library.
Chris Hayes: So you’ve just created a digital version, a digital token of the physical book. But you’ve been the one that digitized it.
Kyle Courtney: Yes. And more importantly, when the person’s reading it and looking at it, they can’t download it. They can’t copy it. They can access it. It prevents them from spreading
Chris Hayes: It’s protected.
Kyle Courtney: It’s protected. Using the same software that the publishers use for their e-books. I want to be very clear. Brewster has this system tight and perfect. And that’s what they’re suing about.
Chris Hayes: Okay, so Brewster, the Internet Archive uses this method.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah, we own a lot of books. We’ve been digitizing these and making them available for ourselves. But also hundreds of other libraries have been doing this all since 2011. This is common library practice. And we even stay away from the most recent five years just to, you know, knock off the commercial angle of these
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: And then we weave them back into Wikipedia. We basically fulfill a couple million links in Wikipedia so you can click to open to write the right page. What’s interesting is people only look at these books usually for a couple of minutes. They’re checking a fact. It’s not beach reading. You just don’t do that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: You know, it’s basically you’re using it like you’re standing in a library.
Chris Hayes: And why are they suing on this?
Kyle Courtney: Because they feel that the licensed e-books, again, the forced rentals they’ve put upon libraries, should be the only way that --
Chris Hayes: The only standard.
Kyle Courtney: -- the only standard that a patron can access at work, right? Licensing culture is out of control. You use Hulu and Netflix as an example, right. We don’t own any of that, nor are we likely to. My fear is as a result of this case, libraries become the next Hulu or Netflix and that says, you know, last day to read this book, August 31st, because that’s what happens. These books expire and they leave our communities unless we pay more.
Chris Hayes: So the standard that you’re using is the CDL standard, which is we digitize books. We have tight controls on them so we could lend them one at a time. They can exist in digital space such that they could be used to check a fact. They could add to our store of knowledge. We don’t like that protocol because we don’t control it.
Kyle Courtney: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We want to control the digital versions of our intellectual properties --
Kyle Courtney: Yes.
Chris Hayes: -- such that we kind of hold always a sort of veto that it can expire. Like, we’re licensing it, which means we could always take it back.
Kyle Courtney: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Ultimately, you don’t own it. You are a custodian of it for the time being
Kyle Courtney: You’re a renter. They’re the landlords and we’re the renters. Libraries are being turned into renters.
Chris Hayes: Right. So that’s actually very useful. So the library model is an ownership model because you guys buy the books and you own your collections. That’s the asset you have.
Kyle Courtney: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And that’s what you make public.
Kyle Courtney: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And they want to convert it to a rental.
Kyle Courtney: Absolutely, because I understand why they would want us not to loan a book a thousand times and only pay once. They want us to get a thousand licenses, which is a revenue capital stream that looks much better to them than the --
Chris Hayes: Oh, so they want to charge you for each rental?
Kyle Courtney: Oh, God, yes. There’s checkouts, price checkouts, there’s 26 checkouts and you have to buy the book again. There’s in a year or two years, these works expire. There’s many methods they use to prevent us from owning.
Chris Hayes: Wait. I just want to make sure I understand this. You’re saying that’s the current market model for digital --
Kyle Courtney: Yes.
Brewster Kahle: Yes.
Kyle Courtney: Yes.
Chris Hayes: -- digital books from the large publishers.
Brewster Kahle: Twenty six times and then it’s --
Kyle Courtney: Gone.
Brewster Kahle: -- gone. It costs hundreds of dollars just to get those 26 potential lends.
Chris Hayes: Okay, I know. Okay. I’m going to publish a book next year through a major publisher, Penguin Random House. And so walk me through. So I’m going to publish this book from Penguin Random House. Let’s say Kyle or Brewster or any librarian wants to get a digital version of that book to lend digitally from their library. How does that work?
Kyle Courtney: So the publisher says, okay, here’s the terms by which this book is lent. Now, sometimes they say no libraries for the first two months. They’ve done that before. They embargo it, right? Or sometimes they say, okay, the average person gets it for $19.99, libraries path to pay $199 and they only get it, yeah --
Chris Hayes: Oh, $199 --
Kyle Courtney: Dollars. Yeah,
Chris Hayes: But for multiple rentals, presumably.
Kyle Courtney: No, not necessarily. Libraries pay five to ten times as much for access to e-books than the average consumer does off of a regular e-book site.
Chris Hayes: Really?
Kyle Courtney: Absolutely. And so we’re being punished for our mission, right. I call it a tax on libraries for being able to loan or provide access book. And Chris, this is what I’m talking about. The convenience of e-books comes at the expense of the library admission. And I don’t think that’s a tradeoff. But your book will be offered to libraries for under a twenty six check on model or under a multiple seat model or a pay for loan model. Or, you know, you can loan it as many times you can in a year, but then it goes away, it expires and disappears. So it depends on the publisher. It depends on the vendor, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Okay, so this is clarifying. So the point is that there is a straightforward market logic here, I mean, someone once said to me, and it’s always stuck with me, that if libraries didn’t exist, there’s no way we could create them now.
Kyle Courtney: I fully believe that. I think Brewster might too. I fully believe that.
Chris Hayes: Hundred percent. Like, you couldn’t go to the publishers and all of them and say, hey, we’re going to create a non-profit, non-commercial, you know, in some cases subsidized or municipally-owned system that just gives away your product for free.
Kyle Courtney: Now it’s not for free. I want to be very clear. Libraries pay through the nose, right. It’s not free.
Chris Hayes: Yes. But to the consumers, yes, right. The point being that right now I can, from where I sit right now, right, I can walk to the library and borrow “Trust” by Hernan Diaz, or I can walk three blocks the other direction to my local bookstore and I can buy Hernan Diaz --
Kyle Courtney: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: Hernan Diaz’s “Trust.” And there’s not a ton of products about which that is true.
Brewster Kahle: That is true.
Chris Hayes: Right? If I want, like, you know, if I want, you know, a new basketball, you know, I’m going to buy a new basketball. There’s nowhere I could borrow a basketball. I mean, maybe I would go to the Y, but like the point is that, and I think the reason that you would say, I’m going to take your side of the argument here, is that like information is just different than other products because it has a social, civic, cultural role, right?
Kyle Courtney: I’ll go one further. Libraries are supposed to be immune from market forces like that to provide information to their communities, right, so I agree. There is that marketization of this business model, but libraries are a special slice of the pie. And that’s what we’re trying to get done here.
Brewster Kahle: And they’re widely supported. So, it’s about 20% of all trade publishing is the revenue comes from libraries --
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Brewster Kahle: -- and what libraries are getting is less and less and less for that. So for instance, uh, the “Diary of Anne Frank” costs $27 per student for a 12-month subscription.
Chris Hayes: Wait, that’s not public domain?
Brewster Kahle: No.
Kyle Courtney: It should be.
Chris Hayes: Oh, right. Because the copyright keeps getting extended. Right, right, right.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah. Or you take Mary Grove College, a college that was focused on social justice and they announced their closure and they had this unbelievably great library. They donated it to the Internet Archive and we digitized 70,000 books, but now these publishers demanded that we take 14,000 of those social justice books, most of them are decades old, off the library shelves so no one can really effectively have access to these.
And this is not Chris’s newest book. This is the long tail of books. Libraries support a broad range of authors and what we’re being told is you can only have bestsellers and you can’t even have them. You can just have to make it so that your patrons can go and give over their private information to us, the publisher.
Chris Hayes: Just to be clear to loop back around because I think it’s important when I was using the thought experiment in my book. I mean, it’s not a thought experiment. It’s going to come out next year and hopefully you guys can go get it at your local library, I would hope. That that isn’t what’s at issue in the suit because that’s not the CDL stuff. The stuff that’s like the new to the market e-books is already being operated under these licenses that you’re talking about. The thing they’re suing about are the digitized books.
Brewster Kahle: Well, we would want to go and buy one copy, just one --
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: -- copy so that it could be put into Wikipedia so people could fact check out of your book and be able to refer to it. Not going through these checkout systems that often cost several dollars per ding --
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: -- to go and even go into a fact check on. That’s what we’d like to be able to do. Penguin Random House has repeatedly refused to sell e-books. This could all be solved by they’re just selling e-books.
Chris Hayes: They don’t sell them. They license them.
Kyle Courtney: Right.
Brewster Kahle: They license them in these draconian terms. But so we end up buying hard cover books that we digitize and then we make one copy available. But through this lawsuit, 500,000 books have now disappeared off of the digital bookshelves. This is a devastating blow for people that would never have bought these books. And the substitute of these books and also like page numbers, if you had a page number reference, I have never seen any book with a page number that you could refer to. So citations fail.
We have the equivalent of what we were trying to fix in the web, a fix in the physical book world. And they’re basically saying, nope, that people cannot have access, digital access to the published works of a book form.
Chris Hayes: So Kyle, the publisher’s lawsuit was successful at the district court level, right?
Kyle Courtney: So the district court found it not to be a fair use.
Brewster Kahle: So we lost.
Chris Hayes: Well, meaning it was --
Kyle Courtney: Define success. I mean, it’s on appeal right now, right?
Chris Hayes: Well, it was successful for the plaintiffs. I mean, the plaintiffs won.
Kyle Courtney: I agree. So they wanted the lower court --
Chris Hayes: I’m not saying if they should have, it’s not a normative question. It’s a descriptive question about reality.
Kyle Courtney: Sorry. I get very careful with my answers.
Chris Hayes: The publishing, they sued. They said that the method you’re using was not fair use. They sued and they were found to be --
Brewster Kahle: Infringement.
Chris Hayes: -- it was copyright infringement. And now that’s on appeal, right?
Brewster Kahle: Yes.
Kyle Courtney: So on Friday, the 28th of June is the oral argument. All the briefs have been filed with the second circuit. And this appeal is focusing on a few things, right? That through the control digital lending process, there are legally and economically significant aspects of physical lending that we want the court to review through the lens of fair use. You know, that it continues to preserve the power of print, right?
A library has significant legal usage rights and great fiscal value in its collections and public library systems have spent millions of dollars in building these collections. And so the appeal is about a proper reading of the fair use analysis to control digital lending, but it’s also to reverse something that was stunningly disruptive, I think could be if it continues, which is anyone that has a donate now button or, you know, donate books or donate things, if you’re a nonprofit website, suddenly that’s a commercial action, according to the district court, that may weigh --
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow.
Kyle Courtney: -- against your fair use and that cannot stand either.
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s interesting because fair use, right? Because part of fair use right is that we’re not trying to monetize this thing. It’s in the public domain. And so one of the findings of the district court level is that a donate now button is essentially commercial activity that it might vitiate your claim for fair use.
Kyle Courtney: Yeah, which is just absolutely wrong on every level. I mean, it ignores --
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it seems wrong.
Kyle Courtney: -- the major precedent in the second circuit. And so we’re hoping that second circuit court of appeals will hear that as well.
Chris Hayes: Are there broader implications just for like the knowledge universe that we’re entering into?
Brewster Kahle: Yeah.
Kyle Courtney: Yes. So obviously, so I’m also a fan of open access and the knowledge economy is very important. I think certainly because we’re talking about control digital lending, you know, the books that we have on our shelves, for 20th century works that are in libraries, especially, you know, we refer to this as a 20th century black hole, right? They’re not available for purchase. No new copies are made. They’re unlikely to make the jump to digital, but they’re important works that need to be read, accessed and utilized by our modern patron.
And by the way, our modern patron is younger and younger. And if something’s not digital, it’s as if it does not exist. So I would hate to see the generations be unable to access all of these works that we have preserved. And then the future for them is also bleak because it’s all licensing, whether it’s iTunes or Amazon or Netflix.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So one of the great ironies here, right, to go back to where this conversation started, Brewster, with the notion of the Library of Alexandria, a single repository for all human knowledge and cultural production and, you know, all captured in one place, archived, stored, made accessible. At one level, right, I have more access. I mean, it’s a crazy thing that at any moment I have access to anything and I think about this all the time.
You know, when you sit down, I have a long riff on this in my forthcoming book about, you know, the attention forcing mechanism of the video store, which is that you had to go to the video store and you had to figure out what you’re going to watch that night.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And then you were making a committed decision that you come back, you explain to everyone at the house what you’ve gotten. Maybe they like it, maybe they don’t. But that’s what you’re going to watch, right. And at any given moment now, so at one level, we have this sort of overwhelming choice of I have access to so much of the world’s knowledge. I can watch anything at any time.
But then there are these black holes emerging, huge swaths of things that are winking out of existence. And I remember, you know, there are movies that you can no longer get. There are, you know, a variety of places have taken shows off their service. And I know showrunners and actors who were on a show that’s now it just doesn’t exist anymore or anywhere.
When Turner Classic Movies, there was some discussion in the corporate reordering that that might be taken off. And there was this like rebellion of folks, including, I think, like Martin Scorsese and everyone, because it’s like, this is the only way we can see these films. So there’s a weird paradox, Brewster, here, which is that we have access to more than anything ever before.
Brewster Kahle: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But the possibility of total death, of black hole, of things winking out of existence is also as present as it’s ever been.
Brewster Kahle: Absolutely. It is so easy to get something on everything. And thank God for Wikipedia, another pillar of the open world.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Brewster Kahle: I love the line from the headline, Current Affairs, said the truth is paywall, but the lies are free. That we basically have this world that we’re coming to, where things are more and more promoted. And if we’re going to have people be educated, be ready for elections, we need to be able to think critically. We need to be able to quote what people have said. We need to be able to compare and contrast it. We need to be able to say whether historical events actually happen.
This requires getting access. It’s the wonder of the Internet. It’s so freaking easy. I mean, all of the words in the Library of Congress would fit in two hard drives that cost less than a month’s rent. Our opportunity for educating people on a global scale is with us. And we have money. There’s a support for all this on libraries and things. It’s not going away. But we also have this sort of, oh, my God, I can control and clamp down and sell less for more is an ethos that we’re seeing.
The St. Charles City County Library in Missouri is probably going to close this summer because of the e-book budget problem. So we’re having libraries hit with bannings and the like. We’re having them hit by budget shortages. We’re hitting them with license problems that we’ve covered for the last half an hour here extensively. But we’re now having also the judiciary starting to judge against libraries in ways that we haven’t seen in 100 years.
I mean, the Carnegie Libraries exist because we have legislature and judicial support for educating a broad swath of people. And I don’t know, the United States that I grew up in is such a steeped in that tradition of the Carnegie thing. It’s really hard for people to fathom that all of these forces, political, judicial, legislative, funding are all going against a tradition that built America out of a set of immigrants and brought us together to be able to know how to work as a populace. And all of that is in, well, some of it is going to be judged again by an appellate group in lower Manhattan, and we’ll see what it is they decide towards the fate of libraries as we know them.
Chris Hayes: So that’s a stark way to talk about it. I mean, is that is that how you see this case, Kyle, that like this case will determine the fate of libraries as we know them?
Kyle Courtney: I mean, it’s a slippery slope into a licensed-only culture in which libraries cannot exist and missionless challenge. I do agree that a lot of people say, oh, this is just about the Internet Archives Open Libraries program. It’s a narrow focus. I don’t think that’s true. It’s about libraries entering and being supported in the digital space and through the use of either licensing or litigation. That’s a one-two punch, really will threaten the library mission now and in the future.
That’s why, you know, I have been fully supporting the Internet Archive in this mission this entire time, because they represent a library that’s doing cutting edge, access oriented programming that was woefully needed.
Chris Hayes: Do you think Brewster and I’ll go to you first and Kyle that I wonder also how much the kind of intellectual culture around this has changed? I mean, obviously, there are pecuniary motives for the big publishers, whatever. And that that is what it is. They have the incentives they have, and those are what they are. But it’s interesting to me this model of licensing, it’s amazing how much it’s crept up, like people’s printers, the software that, you know, now you don’t actually store your own information anymore. Like it used to be the case that I would and I do this now still because I kind of reject the, you know, all the cloud stuff, which I use for backup.
But I am old fashioned. It’s like I want my files that I own on my physical hard drive, which is right here in my house that I control. And now everything is a license, you know, the software, you don’t buy anymore. Software-as-a-Service. Your hard drive space is essentially licensed. You sign a license and now it says, oh, you want to save this to Microsoft OneDrive? It’s like, wait, what? What are we doing here? What can I save it to my hard drive? I know where my hard drive is. I control my hard drive.
Well, no, why don’t you just save it to OneDrive? It’s like, okay, here’s the end user license agreement. Okay, scroll through 5,000 words, click, okay. What did I just sign? I don’t know. Did you just say did I just click yes, that you can take anything in there and sell it or publish it? I have no idea. I just signed some license agreement for you to store my data. And this model is so ubiquitous, just even in like consumer life, Brewster. It increasingly is the life, it is the model for interaction with anything digital.
Brewster Kahle: Well, we have things that we can do. The technologists are working on decentralized web technology, which is encouraging and please cover it. You as an author, Chris, can go to your publisher next year and say, I want my books to be sold, really honest to God’s sold in the same sense that my hard copies are sold to a library, I want an e-book sold so that they don’t get a license. They get a receipt, you know, after they pay money for it and just charge the same amount as an e-book is a book.
There was this sort of like, oh, everything’s new again. We can repaint all of the rules. The powerful can become even more powerful because of this new technology. And they’re taking advantage of that. But we can also make it so that it’s a much more of a people’s thing where there’s broad support for authors. There’s broad support for publishers. We can have no centralized points of control. That was the dream of the Internet that I signed on to. It is possible.
Wikipedia, Internet Archive, there are lots of nonprofits that are doing some of this. It’s a choice. We even have news organizations that are going open access and they’re making it work. The Internet Archive had 150,000 people click donate to the Internet Archive last year. That’s kind of awesome.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: You know, because we’re kind of a back end thing. People know they’re on Wikipedia. They often don’t know they’re on the Internet Archive. But 150,000 said this is important to keep alive. And maybe it’s because they were Grateful Deadheads or they like their flash or their old time radio or their whatever it is that they like. But they know that they have to support the things that they love, that there are mechanisms to make an economy work where there are lots of winners, the people get what they want, but it doesn’t play into one corporate control panel.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Kyle Courtney: So, of course, I agree with what Brewster said. Chris, I think you have a natural inclination for being maybe a collection development librarian or archivist because you’re like, I want my stuff right here and physically access it. And I talk with a lot of folks across the United States and libraries that are out there. The questions that are coming from patrons and folks that are aware of this case in general and stuff are interesting.
But the answer from the publishers and rights holders is always more licensing. That’s the answer to everything, right? No fair use, get a license. No text data mining, get a license. No AI training, get a license. Everything is licensing. And this answer of licensing threatens the purpose, values and missions of all libraries. It undermines the ability of the public, right, the taxpayers to access the materials that are purchased with their money, right, for use in public libraries and state institutions.
And further, I think it’s short sighted is what you’re saying, right? You’re like, how come I can’t get this stuff anymore? How can we have access to stuff? We have a 20th century black hole. We have swaths of information that just will never be released again unless you pay a license. So it’s not in the best interest of library patrons, the public at large. But that kind of knowledge economy that you’re discussing, that we need to be able to provide these materials to everyone.
Chris Hayes: You know, it’s funny, too, as you talk about the licensing, I mean, on the flip side, on the other side of this question about fair use is AI, right, where now you’ve got this like insane situation where everyone put everything on the Internet for public use. And then a bunch of companies sent their large language learning models and fed it all that stuff, not for the purpose that the Internet Archive exists, which is to make it publicly accessible, but to train large learning models to, you know, talk like people in a chatbot, basically, or do whatever they do. And then monetize it, you know.
So, I realize that the publishers are the are the quote, unquote “bad guys” in this lawsuit from your perspective, but they’re now suing. Now, there’s going to be a bunch of lawsuits on the other side.
Kyle Courtney: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right? On exactly this, in which you’re already seeing publishers and I think a whole bunch of, you know, entities that publish or produce or own the intellectual property on content, suing the AI people to say you can’t just take this stuff to make your models and be okay with it.
Brewster Kahle: Yeah. I would suggest what we need is a rule of law, not rule of contract.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Right.
Brewster Kahle: What happens when you have a rule of contract is you have very big people just bludgeoning it out with lawyers.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes.
Brewster Kahle: And nobody that has lots of lawyers are going to be at that table. So we’ll end up with a deal between these publishers and, you know --
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Right.
Brewster Kahle: -- the big AI companies. But the idea I’d love to see, we have a new tool in town. It’s kind of cool. Let’s go and use it for some big, hard problems like health care or climate inventions.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: Or there are things that we could go as libraries. It could be the research libraries day. The research libraries have been basically holding on to these materials. Why would you read agricultural records of Argentina from the 1930s? We happen to have them. No human is going to do that, but machines do.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: And unless these lawsuits make it so that it’s taken out of the possibility of the public sphere --
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: -- and only lands with the very wealthy. And people usually don’t think that next step through. The United States the last time that AI came around, it was Google. They basically hoovered up other people’s websites and made a search engine out of it. And they were allowed by law in the United States to do that.
Chris Hayes: And it was important they did because if they weren’t, then we wouldn’t have the Internet.
Kyle Courtney: Absolutely.
Brewster Kahle: Absolutely. The dotcom boom happened in the United States because of law and --
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: -- judiciary allowing that to happen
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: It did not happen in Europe or Japan. You notice there’s no search engine in Europe. There’s no search engine in Japan. It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because their laws sided with the publishers. And if we go and do that in this AI round and I’m not, you know, just trying to shill --
Chris Hayes: That’s Internet.
Brewster Kahle: -- for the big guys, I want the little guys. I want every library to go and take their collections or take the ornithology information from Cornell and around all of the ornithologists and start training models.
If we make that illegal based on this, we will lose out on a major opportunity in the United States. And I’ll tell you, Europe has seen around this corner and they’ve already made regulations allowing cultural heritage institutions and research organizations, nonprofits to train AIs. Japan went further and said, we’re not going to step out of this next level of innovation. We’re going to allow it. Let robots read.
In the United States. It’s just a free for all. We don’t have a legislature that’s really guiding things very well. And we’ll see what happens in the judiciary. So it’s a new game. And innovation, is it going to be grassroots or is it only going to be a few gigantic players that have enough lawyers to sue themselves into a deal with these gigantic publishers?
Kyle Courtney: Yeah.
Brewster Kahle: That’s where I see this is going.
And I’m a big fan of a game with many winners. I want to see libraries and archives be able to bring their materials to bear under the right circumstances. Maybe it’s nonprofit works. Maybe it’s these, you know, nonprofit models to be able to do great things with these tools to help solve some of the big problems we’ve got.
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting. It is very interesting. You know, all my feelings about AI are sort of, I would say, instinctual, impulsive, visceral and not --
Brewster Kahle: Careful.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, they are. I mean, I’m thinking about it a lot, but I don’t feel like I have a fixed view on things. I’m sort of open to persuasion on a bunch of things. There’s a bunch of it that I find like weird and crass and like I’m being --
Brewster Kahle: It’s early days. They’re weird.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And there’s a lot of like shoving a solution to me without a problem.
Kyle Courtney: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like you need to buy this solution. It’s like, what is this solving for? It’s like, well, okay. Well, I don’t know if I need it.
Brewster Kahle: Oh, you’re talking to archivists. So you remember the dotcom boom? Do you remember when you got warm cookies and milk delivered to your door? It’s just our dog food shipped through the mail.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Brewster Kahle: It was just --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Brewster Kahle: There was this weird, wonderful things that came about. Most of it made no sense.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Brewster Kahle: But it was kind of cool. And people believed and they put their dreams into this new technology. And right now, people are putting their dreams and their fears into this AI thing. Let’s shape it to be something that serves us. Let’s go and actually have some rules and guardrails on it by legislatures, not just --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Brewster Kahle: -- corporate rule.
Chris Hayes: Yes. That line rule of law, not rule of contract, is a really important one, because you’re right. That’s so much the way this all gets settled in the U.S. is large litigation between powerful entities fighting each other and working out some settlement between tem as opposed to --
Brewster Kahle: Right. The people are not at that table.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, we are a culture.
Brewster Kahle: They are on there.
Chris Hayes: We’re a culture that litigates rather than regulates. Generally, that’s how things work here.
Kyle Courtney: Oh, well, that’s why there’s over 30 lawsuits currently in the courts about --
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Kyle Courtney: -- and by the way, it’s mostly books. Now there’s some music on there, too. You know, just last week, the major music labels sued some AI startup music companies.
Chris Hayes: Yeah
Kyle Courtney: But again, the answer, I just want to say, it’s the same answer we’re seeing in the CDL case to bring this together for a moment. The answer is licensing, right? So I’ve been in many AI discussions room where they’re like, you want to use our stuff, you want to train, get a license, get permission. That’s the only way to do it. And thankfully, the rule of law is not that, right? We have text and data mining. We have Google Books. We have Google Images. We have all these things where you can copy the entire thing, the whole thing, use it for something new and different and allow that technology to exist.
So I think we have our answers through the rule of law already. But all these cases, all this litigation is going to slow down the entry for nonprofit, right --
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Kyle Courtney: -- research based. And, you know, Brewster and I are waving our arms saying we’re not mega companies We’re not for profit things. We’re researchers that want to do text and data mining. We’re high school students that want to experiment with AI. All of these things should be able to be done in the nonprofit educational standpoint, where libraries have been planting their flag for forever.
Chris Hayes: Brewster Kahle is a digital librarian at the Internet Archive. He’s perhaps best known for the Wayback Machine. Kyle Courtney is a lawyer, librarian, director of copyright and information policy for Harvard Library, co-founder of Library Futures, which aims to empower the digital future of America’s libraries. That was a totally fascinating conversation about something I knew literally nothing about. It was one of my favorite kinds of conversations.
Kyle Courtney: Oh, my pleasure.
Brewster Kahle: Thank you very much, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, my great thanks to Brewster Kahle and Kyle Courtney. No decision has been made in this appeal yet. A decision may come this fall. We will keep you updated. We’d love to hear your feedback on all of this. As always, I love reading your e-mails. I should write back to more of them. We do read each one we get.
You can e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads at @chrislhayes and on Bluesky @chrislhayes and on what used to be called Twitter as @chrislhayes.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Katie Lau and Bob Mallory, featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?