Brewster Kahle

Public information that disappears from a website is as lost as a burned file. Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996 and opened the Wayback Machine in 2001, which has since saved more than a trillion web pages. With libraries and universities, the archive captures US federal websites at each change of administration, and journalists, researchers and courts use those copies when agencies remove reports, data or guidance. Its book-lending programme lost a copyright case brought by publishers in 2023, upheld on appeal in 2024, a reminder that its access mission has legal limits.