Lila Bailey gives the keynote address at Georgetown Law’s iPIP Clinic Celebration.
Libraries, now more than ever, need innovative, dedicated champions to help them meet the needs of the public in the digital age. Internet Archive’s Lila Bailey said she sees hope in the talents of Georgetown University law students working at the school’s Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic (iPIP).
Bailey, Internet Archive’s senior policy counsel, was the keynote speaker at iPIP’s fifth anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C., on March 27. She praised the clinic for providing quality research and creative work products on projects that have helped the Internet Archive promote awareness of the public ___domain, controlled digital lending, and other issues related to the public interest mission of libraries at a challenging time.
“Libraries are at the forefront of using technologies of the day to serve the informational needs of their communities. And they do it without trying to sell you anything, and without selling any data about you either,” Bailey said. “Right now, libraries—whether they are digital, or brick and mortar—are under threat.”
Between moves to ban books, defund institutions, and dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, libraries are facing perilous times. Publishers have simply stopped selling digital books to libraries, forcing them to use commercial platforms that come with terms and conditions that restrict how those materials may be used, Bailey explained. The iPIP clinic had a hand in drafting a paper on the topic, she noted, called, “The Publisher Playbook.”
Today, libraries need lawyers, yet most don’t have in-house counsel, Bailey said. That makes the contributions of student law clinics so vital at this juncture.
“Clinics play an important role in the library and public interest tech community by expanding our capacity to tackle these existential threats and to pursue opportunities for positive changes,” Bailey said. “[iPIP]s Founder] Amanda Levendowski has built a truly outstanding clinical program in these five short years.”
Bailey explained under copyright law, a library can lend out a book it owns to as many people as it wants to, for as long as it wants to. It can also preserve a book for the long term, and make it available long past when a publisher may sell it. The law also allows libraries to make copies of a book in an accessible format for patrons who are blind or have other print-disabilities, and participate in interlibrary loan arrangements, so that patrons of other libraries can access books they don’t have in their own collections. Yet, Bailey said, under these licensing models with publishers, none of those practices is allowed.
“These market-based threats are a completely new kind of challenge that require creative legal and policy interventions,” Bailey said.
In her remarks, Bailey described how her interest in the field began nearly twenty years ago when she chose to go to law school at University of California Berkeley, in part because of its Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “[The internet] was new. I was optimistic to democratize access to information and saw it as a revolutionary force,” she said. Bailey’s first client at the clinic was the Internet Archive, working on a project that would eventually become the TV News Archive. She later became a teaching fellow at the clinic, and joined the Internet Archive staff in 2017.
Since iPIP’s first semester in 2020, Bailey said she has worked closely with student teams that exceeded her expectations, delivering materials to advance the needs of the Internet Archive, and the wider library community.
“The iPIP Clinic has become an indispensable partner to me as I do my work as an advocate for libraries working to build a healthier digital information ecosystem,” Bailey said.
Amanda Levendowski, associate professor of law and the founding director of the iPIP Clinic, credited Bailey and her willingness to work with students as a reason the clinic has been successful in tackling cutting-edge issues at the intersection of technological advancements and social justice.
“Library lawyering work is an exercise in imagination,” Levendowski said. “A sense of play and creativity around the law has never been more important, because that’s going to be how we get out of the moment we’re in.”
The following guest post from digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
I would never have thought I would see the day when the library system itself is under attack.
At home I had a couple of shelves of treasured kids’ books while my parents had walls coated with books. The books and periodicals of my writer and publisher grandfather were on a special bookshelf in the room next to the kitchen—maybe not consulted often, but proudly protected and displayed. But the delight of first going to the White Plains Public Library is indelibly imprinted in my mind—the bookshelves seemed to go on forever. There was book after book after Alice in Wonderland in the card catalog, books about mathematical recreations I could not imagine finding anywhere else, and record albums I could borrow. And I still remember the librarian saying, “You can read any of these books you want, and if we don’t have the one you want, we can get it for you [through the magic of interlibrary loan].” And this was all for free, which was the only thing that worked for a child. And available to everyone who could get their bones through that door of that magic place.
As a child, I did not know how special libraries were—I thought it was just how society worked—I thought there always were and always would be public libraries. I did not realize how fragile this system was until I became a digital librarian in order to make this promise come true for the next generation, a generation of digital learners. I did not think that in my lifetime this offer, this seeming human right, would be threatened by the people that made the fantasy-land of the White Plains Public Library possible: the corporate publishers.
Based on a simple but catastrophic business decision, the big publishers are making it impossible for libraries to do their core functions of preservation and enduring access in the digital era. Netflix, for instance, recently changed its terms of service to explicitly prohibit archiving, therefore allowing them to remove or change any movie for all subscribers at once.1 The decision of the big publishers that is so threatening to the mission of libraries is to stop selling their products. Their books, music, and videos—as the world moves digital—are only available for temporary access by library patrons from databases the publishers control.
At the dawn of the Internet age, we dreamed of a different future, a future where authors got paid for their work, where writings would find their natural audience, where small publishers would flourish supporting a wider range of authors, where new publications and services would democratize production and access to information. The Internet could have been used to create this future, and many of us have worked hard to make it come true, but the lack of antitrust enforcement led to rapid consolidation of publishers, Internet technologies allowed successful online publishers to become dominant worldwide, and an advertising model that made for very few commercial winners. This toxic brew of the collapse of independent publishers and limited commercial platform controlling distribution has made the decentralized Internet seem like a lost opportunity.
But there is hope for libraries and a public seeking alternatives to the flood of disinformation and promoted materials coming from online and offline information producers. Libraries are still funded and staffed with smart, caring professionals. Readers are becoming more media-aware and discerning. Best of all, people are still free to create and publish quality works with the remaining distribution and compensation structures. It is still possible to have a game with many winners, but maybe this window is closing.
To preserve the library system’s ability to help create an informed citizenry, we need libraries to buy, preserve, and offer free public access to the broad public. Our libraries have traditionally supported local authors and local publishers, and preserved a broad range of text, audio, and moving image materials. Libraries, when not stopped, have moved with the times, through microfilm and CD-ROMs, and now to the Internet in order to provide preservation and access. Our collective budgets in the United States support over 5% of all trade publishing revenues8—enough to cause a leveraged buyout firm, KKR, to find buying major publisher Simon and Schuster a good investment.9 Our libraries are a captive market for a shrinking number of academic and trade publishers.
The best case is that large publishers see the value in selling their digital products through multiple marketplaces, including to libraries. The next best is that independent publishers sell to libraries, and libraries eagerly buy, preserve, and lend from their owned collections. Authors, musicians, filmmakers and creators of all kinds could choose publishers and websites that sell to libraries.10
Our evolving digital age can be our next Carnegie moment or it can be a Library of Alexandria moment. It is up to us.
References
Netflix. 2025. Terms & Conditions. https://www.netflix.shop/pages/terms-conditions “You agree not to archive, download (other than through caching necessary for personal use, to complete a product purchase or submit a customer service request), reproduce, distribute, modify, display, perform, publish, license, create derivative works from, offer for sale, or use content and information contained on or obtained from or through the Shop without express written permission from Netflix and its licensors.” ↩︎
The following guest post from artist and writer Brooke Palmieri is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
As a writer and artist that draws on the long history of gender nonconformity in my work, a driving force behind my practice is the idea that a longing for history will always be a fundamental aspect of humanity, so long as memory itself serves as a foundation for human consciousness. Everyone has a history, but the majority of people are not taught how to look back in order to find it. One problem is the depth and breadth of our losses. People and their prized possessions are destroyed by accident and by design throughout history: armed conflict, invasion, willful destruction, natural disaster, decay. Then there is the fantasy of destruction, a destructive force in its own right, the perception that nothing survives. That fantasy begets a reality of its own: because I don’t go looking for what survives, I don’t find it, or I don’t recognize it when I see it. This is true across subcultures and among historically marginalized or oppressed groups, and for the queer and trans subjects whose histories I am interested in recovering in particular. In the twenty-first century, access to queer and trans history is an accident of birth: knowing someone in your family or neighborhood, living in a place where it isn’t legislated against, going to a school that dares teach it, affording admission into one of the universities that offers classes on it.
My research process tends to triangulate between the archive of my own weird and imperfect human experiences and the debris I collect around them, small collections amassed by and for queer and trans people, and larger institutions that also contain relevant material that begs to be recontextualized. Or to make it personal: to write my upcoming book Bargain Witch: Essays in Self Initiation, I used my journals and the Wayback Machine to look at old websites I’d made when I was 14, the archive of the William Way LGBT center in Philadelphia where I grew up, and special collections at major institutions like the Fales Library at NYU, the Digital Transgender Archive at Northwestern University, and the British Library in London. All my adult life I’ve made pilgrimage between the intimate domestic spaces where people preserve their own histories, to local collections set up on shoestring budgets as a labor of love, to the vast, climate-controlled repositories of state and higher education that have more recently begun to preserve our histories, each enhancing what it is possible for me to know, delight in, or mourn, about where I have come from, the forebears by blood and by choice that imbue my life with its many possibilities.
It’s a creative act to find and make sense of my own history, one that requires a leap of faith in order to fill in the silences, erasures, omissions, and genuine mysteries that old books and documents, records and artifacts, represent. A lot is left to the imagination. Much of what survives from the past asks more questions than we can answer. This is true for queer and trans archival traces, as it is for other aspects of humanity that are poorly accounted for in public records, or actively discriminated against through surveillance and omission in equal parts.
Classically, archives are brutal, desolate places to find humanity; they were never meant to record the nuances of flesh and blood existence so much as they originate as a way governments keep track of their resources. It has taken millennia for us to conceive of records as places where humanity might be honored rather than betrayed. This is an epic change: I am in awe of the fact that I live in a time where the heft of documentary history—clay, parchment, paper, and now pixel—is shifting paradigms from records kept by anonymous paid laborers to flatten life into statistics, to records kept by people who dare to name themselves and their subjectivity, who collect something of themselves and their obsessions, for other kindred spirits to find. From archives as places meant to consolidate power, to places containing mess and sprawl, places for heated encounters.
In the past few decades of “living with the internet” these places and encounters have multiplied exponentially, as queer and trans subcultures have relied on message boards, blogs, and personal websites to share information. I personally relied (and still rely on) on reddit, and the classic, Hudson’s FTM Resource Guide (www.ftmguide.org), and TopSurgery.Net to navigate the healthcare system in both the UK and USA in order to access hormones and surgery—part of a much longer tradition of “the Transgender Internet” that Avery Dame-Griff chronicles in his book The Two Revolutions (2023). To say nothing of AOL in the early 2000s, the culture on Tumblr in the early-to-mid 2010s and printed publications like Original Plumbing andarchived copies of the FTM Newsletter. Digital environments informed me of physical places, and vice versa, and each expanded and embellished my appreciation of the other. From reading books and trawling the internet, I knew places like San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin would be where I could find other trans people. When I moved to London, I knew to go to Gay’s the Word, a queer bookshop that first opened in 1979, to make friends, and eventually, to get a job. When I started my own queer book club, or wanted to find zine fairs or club nights, I often found information about them on tumblr or instagram. When traveling to new cities, a gay friend tipped me off that any place recommended by BUTT Magazine would show me a good time.
But in my queer and trans context, both digital and paper-based archives and libraries are often labors of love, made from scratch, published with a “by us for us” ethos that is under-resourced and so always in danger of disappearing. Most queer publishing from the 1960s onward was issued in small, independent presses that have disappeared. An interesting model for documenting this is the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, where resources and expertise is shared to catalog and digitize collections materials in a centrally kept database. This is mutually beneficial to the places where the materials are kept—accurate cataloging is crucial to using and developing any archive—as well as to interested audiences further afield. And this feels also like a pragmatic approach to the reality of loss: we might not be able to predict what will survive over time, but keeping abundant records in multiple locations of what has existed will at least allow us to mourn our losses.
A culmination of my interests in hunting and gathering queer history is my imprint and traveling installation: CAMP BOOKS. I started CAMP BOOKS in 2018 as a way to highlight the places I’d most enjoyed meeting queer and trans people–independent bookshops, which have a rich, radical history throughout subculture–and as a way to keep the focus on making and distributing publications about the obscure histories I was unearthing in my research. Before libraries sought to cater to an LGBTQIA+ readership, specialist bookshops like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, Giovanni’s Room, and Gay’s the Word were the only places you could find concentrations of queer, feminist books with positive portrayals of queer lives. These shops were hubs of culture: places where community events were held and publicized, activists groups were able to meet, and friendship and romance could blossom in broad daylight. CAMP BOOKS sets up pop-up bookshops, tables at art and zine fairs, and also builds installations in galleries and community spaces to continue this tradition. I also sell rare books and ephemera related to queer history through CAMP BOOKS in order to fund our efforts, including new publications, zines, and posters related to queer and trans history. The CAMP BOOKS motto is: “Queer Pasts Nourish Queer Futures,” and this extends to our model of generating funds from past efforts to fund new writing and work. I also believe this logic can extend to anyone: preserving what interests you about the past brings a particular pleasure of connection into the present. Most of the people I have loved in my life, I have met and known through shared obsessions with the past, and it has brought a lot of pleasure and adventure into my life.
An abiding concern I have had about cultural preservation—in my case, subcultural preservation, because the people I love across time existed in a myriad of DIY subcultures that often cross-pollinated art, music, and literary influences—and have heard from others, revolves around the question of inheritance and access. You can inherit books and papers, art and artifacts, but you can’t inherit e-books, and born digital archives require specialist care and technology. My hope is that this divide is bridged by reconsidering the nature of inheritance itself: rather than an individual’s gain, queer and trans history is something that we are all heir to, and can all benefit from accessing. Large institutions, and large digital repositories in particular, play a crucial role in rewriting the meaning of inheritance by offering freely accessible, and accurately cataloged, information. But ultimately, archives that document human experience begin at home, and rely on people whose love for their lives, their friends, and their scenes inspire them to save posters, photographs, and other receipts–online and offline–that document their experiences. I hope after reading this, you start saving something of your life now.
About the author
Brooke Palmieri is an artist and writer working at the intersection of memory, history, and gender-bending alternate realities. In 2018, Brooke founded CAMP BOOKS, promoting access to queer history through rare archival materials, cheap zines, and workshops/installations. His book, Bargain Witch, comes out in Fall 2025 by Dopamine Books. You can find out more at http://bspalmieri.com.
Senior Organizer, mai ishikawa sutton, in front of the RightsCon25 sign
In late February, members of the DWeb Core Team and the DWeb community were in Taipei to attend the 13th edition of RightsCon, the largest global summit on human rights in the digital age. Namely, we were there to connect with the digital rights community. We wanted to participate in an event where thousands of people travel from around the world to discuss the current and future state of the internet, and to meet others who were involved in building decentralized, distributed, and peer-to-peer network technologies.
Thus we took the opportunity to organize activities before and during the conference: a local networking workshop co-organized with g0v, sessions on both DWeb organizing and how fiction can better depict surveillance technologies, a DWeb dinner, as well as a final day of tabling in the halls of the venue.
DWeb x g0v Local Network Workshop
Michael Suantak, Cheng of g0v, and mai standing in front of National Taipei University of Technology where the community network workshop took place
We partnered with g0v, the leading decentralized civic technology community in Taiwan, to co-organize an event focused on local community networks at the National Taipei University of Technology. When we met with them several months ago, g0v leaders told us that they wanted to connect with those building and stewarding community networks. Such networks are controlled directly by communities, especially in places where internet access is non-existent or undermined, in order to maintain local network services and ensure internet connections are available or affordable. In Taiwan, these types of decentralized network infrastructures are a potential lifeline, as internet shutdowns in the country remain an ever-present threat.
DWeb standing banner in front of the classroom where the workshop took place
Our event, “Building Resilient Connections: A Hands-on Local Network Workshop” dove into the core concepts of community networks, their technical setups, and the ways they’re making a difference in under-served communities worldwide.
We had a great turnout: attended by more than 35 people. Since we had a survey built into our registration form, we knew what topics the participants were interested in learning about and tailored the workshop to them. These included community networks’ key challenges and opportunities, technical overview and tools, and issues surrounding their ethics, privacy and security.
Cheng introducing g0v at the community network workshop
Notably, we had community network leaders from Myanmar, Taiwan, and Indonesia present case studies on their community networks, from the technologies they use to the ways they govern and manage the networks. We were lucky to be able to bring Michael Suantak to lead the presentations and the workshop on locally-hosted services. He was a 2024 DWeb Fellow, but for visa reasons he was not able to attend DWeb Camp in person, so we were happy to learn from him in person!
Michael Suantak giving a presentation on local community networks
Sean of Mesh TWC also gave a presentation and workshop, as well as Gustaff H. Iskandar of Common Room who joined us from Indonesia. The sessions were not recorded, but you can view their notes and slides below (note: these are Google docs and Google slides).
Slide from a presentation by Gustaff of Common Room on community networks
We ended with a few hands-on activities with Meshtastic LoRa devices and local-first services, as well as a discussion on the role of community networks in digital literacy and empowerment.
Group photo of the community networks workshop who stayed until the end!
Attending RightsCon 2025
RightsCon brings over 3,000 people from all corners of the globe to discuss the most pressing concerns facing people’s digital rights today. At a sprawling convention center in Taipei, hundreds of sessions took place across the last week of February, on issues related to free expression, privacy, and innovation and creativity online — specifically surrounding organizing tactics, policy advocacy, and sustaining movements in the face of rising authoritarianism worldwide. There was also notable interest in decentralized web solutions to these crises, with sessions led by DWeb Camp attendees, the Social Web Foundation, Equalitie, Project Liberty, Open Future, WITNESS, Open Archive, and Creative Commons.
RightsCon25 Opening Ceremony
Round Table DWeb Workshop
We led a workshop discussion on strategies for decentralized, transnational organizing. Approximately 25 people attended and came to learn about the DWeb community. We shared our approach to building trust and solidarity between projects and individuals working to create a decentralized web that is usable, secure, and people-centric, all in spite of the exploitative and profit-driven status quo of the Internet. We spent the hour strategizing effective tactics for transnational organizing. Namely, how to use in-person and online gatherings to organize, share resources, and build enduring connections to strengthen our efforts.
Stop Surveillance Copaganda Workshops
Lia Holland of Fight for the Future and I co-facilitated three workshops on the Stop Surveillance Copaganda project, a partnership between Fight For the Future and COMPOST Magazine. The discussions centered around how we better support fiction that depicts futures and alternate realities where privacy is a universally respected human right. Attendees shared useful resources and analyses of surveillance tech’s impacts, as well as real-world tactics to resist illegal surveillance. Everything we gleaned from that week will go into a toolkit for authors and artists to more justly depict surveillance technologies.
Stop Surveillance Copaganda Session at RightsCon25
RightsCon Booth
We signed up to table at RightsCon in order to introduce ourselves to the digital rights community and meet those working to build alternative, decentralized technologies. Dozens of new and familiar faces stopped by to grab our stickers and zines, and to learn about what the DWeb community has been doing to build our movement.
Senior Organizer, mai, tabling at RightsCon25
DWebbers Dinner
Mid-conference, we organized a DWeb hot pot dinner for those of us in town for the event!
Group photo of DWebbers having hot pot!
Attending RightsCon this year felt incredibly productive and worthwhile. We’ll likely be there at the next one — in order to build better webs and learn from the past, it’s crucial that we connect with those directly confronting the pervasive challenges of the mainstream internet. That has always been our north star: to build decentralized technologies that help solve real world problems, not just in the future, but now.
Yesterday, the Internet Archive submitted its response to the record labels’ recent motion, which seeks to add an additional 493 sound recordings to their lawsuit against the Internet Archive for preserving 78rpm sound recordings.
The Internet Archive’s position is clear: the labels have been engaged in a long-running game of “hide-the-ball” and their motion to file a second amended complaint should be denied.
The full response is available here (PDF); the entire docket is here (CourtListener).
Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive:
“More than 850 musicians have called on Universal Music Group to drop its lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Instead, the recording industry has decided to aggressively escalate its attack at a time when the Internet Archive’s preservation efforts have never been more vital.”
Learn more about the lawsuit
In 2023, major labels sued the Internet Archive for preserving 78rpm sound recordings. Learn more about the lawsuit, and why the Internet Archive is fighting back:
Films entering the public ___domain will soon face a significant shift. In 2030, films governed by the Hays Code will start to enter the public ___domain. The Hays Code was a set of self-imposed industry censorship guidelines enforced from 1934 to 1968 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), under the leadership of Will H. Hays. Designed to regulate morality in Hollywood films, the code dictated strict rules on depictions of crime, sex, and “immoral” behavior, shaping the creative boundaries of American cinema for decades.
In a comment on one of the Internet Archive’s social media posts, Bluesky user josiahwhite suggested an interesting idea: that due to the restrictions of the Hays Code “[t]he public ___domain will get a lot more boring.” While this idea might at first seem true, upon further examination it actually clouds the clever ways in which filmmakers of the time navigated the restrictive influence of the Hays Code to tell creative and compelling stories.
To illustrate this point, we shall explore three films—It Happened One Night, To Be or Not to Be, and Double Indemnity—each of which engaged with the Hays Code in distinct ways. Through these case studies, we will see that while the Hays Code imposed restrictions, it did not stifle creativity. Instead, filmmakers found ingenious and often subversive ways to work within and around these constraints, producing films that remain influential to this day.
It Happened One Night (1934): A Pre-Code Example
Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert
Being a pre-Code film, one might assume that Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night is hugely risqué, pushing the boundaries of obscenity and serving as a final burst of unfettered creative filmmaking. However, the reality is more complex. While the film includes suggestive moments—such as Claudette Colbert’s character, Ellie, showing some leg to attract passing vehicles, or mentions of gangster violence—it also adheres to many traditional moral expectations of its time. Opposite Colbert’s Ellie is Clark Gable’s character, Peter, a down on his luck newspaper man with a hard edge. Peter first meets Ellie when a man on their bus, Shapely, begins hitting on Ellie. Shapely attempts to endear himself to Ellie as “Fun on the Side Shapely,” flaunting his disregard for marriage vows. This denigration of marriage would not play well in the Hays Code, and the film itself seems to take issue with it as well, as Peter gets Shapely to leave by pretending to be Ellie’s husband.
When Peter and Ellie are forced to share a cabin for the night, they construct a makeshift barrier—a sheet dubbed the “Walls of Jericho”—to maintain a sense of modesty. While there was no Code explicitly forbidding an unmarried man and woman from sharing a room at the time, the film nonetheless applies its own restrictions, anticipating the kinds of rules the Hays Code would later enforce. A deeper reading of these moral themes appears as the name, “Walls of Jericho,” references the religious story from the Book of Joshua, incorporating Judeo-Christian values that would later be emphasized under the Hays Code.
The film ultimately concludes with Peter and Ellie getting married, affirming the cultural ideal of heterosexual marriage that the Code would later regulate as a fundamental norm. So what emerges from It Happened One Night is a blend of the unregulated era of Hollywood and the values that would soon be codified under the Hays Code. Despite the interplay of these influences, the film remains a masterwork. It was the first film in Academy Awards history to win all five major categories—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay—an achievement that underscores both its artistic brilliance and its lasting appeal.
To Be or Not to Be (1942): A Satirical Challenge to the Code
Carole Lombard and Jack Benny
By the early 1940s, Hollywood was firmly under the Hays Code’s influence and deeply entrenched in World War II. Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical comedy To Be or Not to Be follows a Polish theater troupe whose production of Hamlet is disrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. At its core, the film actively mocks and ridicules the Nazis in direct contradiction to the Hays Code’s provision against making “willful offense to any nation.” Though, given that the target was the Nazis, it appears this rule was conveniently overlooked.
One of the most striking aspects of To Be or Not to Be is its subversion of the Hays Code’s depiction of marriage and fidelity. The film centers on Joseph and Maria Tura, a married couple who lead the Polish theater troupe. Maria, played by Carole Lombard, is heavily implied to be unfaithful to Joseph, played by Jack Benny, which the film often underplays for laughs. Her admirer, a young Polish pilot named Stanislav Sobinski, regularly leaves the audience during Joseph’s delivery of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” monologue to secretly meet with Maria backstage. Joseph is frustrated that his performance is being disregarded, while not at all aware of the deeper intentions behind the disturbance. Sobinski and Maria’s relationship continues to the point of Sobinski suggesting she divorce her husband to marry him, very much in line with the code. He additionally suggests she retire from acting to become a housewife. However, Maria proves reticence to do either, thus subverting the infidelity in one regard, and pushing back on the normative gender roles that the Hays Code sought to uphold. Sobinski’s relationship with Maria is cut short when he is called to war following the Nazi invasion.
The plot is propelled forward when he returns to Poland and uncovers a Nazi spy masquerading as a Polish professor who plans to root out the Polish resistance. The film plays with its Code subversion through humor, such as a memorable gag in which Joseph returns home to find Sobinski sleeping in his bed, suggesting further infidelity. While nothing improper has actually happened—Sobinski was given refuge after parachuting from his plane into Poland—the physical staging of the scene suggests Maria’s attraction to Sobinski remains unresolved.
In the film, the Nazis take Maria hostage just as Sobinski returns. Throughout the film, she skillfully leverages their desires for her attractiveness by navigating herself and others out of danger, and taking some Nazis down along the way. Ultimately, Joseph and Sobinski reconcile, but the film’s final scene reinforces Maria’s continued infidelity—just as Joseph delivers his monologue again, another young man rises and exits, mirroring Sobinski’s earlier actions.
While the film cannot be as explicit about its themes due to the Hays Code, it remains sharp and subversive. The humor is relentless, the jokes land with precision, and the script is exceptionally tight. Despite the Code’s restrictions, To Be or Not to Be stands as one of Hollywood’s most defining satirical films about the Nazis—proof that even under strict censorship, filmmakers found ways to push boundaries and craft enduring works of comedy and social critique.
Double Indemnity (1944): Adaptation Under the Code
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck
Here we have an interesting example of adaptation and the Hays Code. In 1935, the original story was submitted by author, James M. Cain, to the Hays Code Office for use in a film script. The Office rejected it for “being a blueprint for murder” (Hoopes, 1982, pg. 268, 331). Since printed works were not governed by the standards of the Hays Code, Cain serialized the story in Liberty magazine during 1936. Following its success as a compiled book in 1943, the story eventually underwent adaptation to a motion picture in 1944.
The best known version of the story, the 1944 film, was directed by Billy Wilder, and worked with a Code slightly less sensitive to crime. Yet it still had to adhere to a more restrictive set of rules for the film. The plot remains quite consistent in overall story beats between the mediums. An insurance salesman, Walter, falls in love with a client, Phyllis, and the two commit insurance fraud and murder, killing Phyllis’ husband. Following the murder, the two fall apart and grow distrustful of each other. Seeking to get revenge for putting him through the ordeal, Walter seeks to kill Phyllis by surprise. The two diverge in this encounter.
In the film version, Walter and Phyllis mortally wound each other in a shootout. Phyllis dies during the shooting, but a mortally injured Walter gets away. He returns to his office, and there he recounts the entirety of the plot into a dictaphone before succumbing to his injuries.
The film’s ending places much more emphasis on finality for both characters. While the Code had loosened up on crime films by 1944, it still desired to show the consequences of crime. In its initial 1935 rejection of the story, the Office believed it was depicting “an adulterous relationship” where the criminals “get away with the crime” (Hoopes, 1982, pg. 268, 331). By ensuring the film reinforces the Code’s moral stance against adultery and murder, eliminating the ambiguity present in the book’s ending.
Neither Phyllis nor Walter die in the shootout. Instead, Walter recovers, and escapes on a boat to Mexico. While aboard the boat, Walter runs into Phyllis. After briefly reuniting, the two are implied to be contemplating suicide by jumping into the water right as the book ends.
Even with these adaptational changes, the film is highly entertaining, constantly building suspense through the imagery, editing, and narrative twist. In the end, the restrictions of the Hays Code don’t actively harm the tale, but rather creates a different interpretation of the events.
Conclusion
In looking at It Happened One Night, To Be or Not to Be, and Double Indemnity, we can see how the Hays Code shaped Hollywood, and had creative filmmakers navigate its restrictions in ways that often led to ingenious results. The argument that public ___domain works will become less exciting as we enter the Hays Code era is not hard to envision, but it overlooks the reality that creative expression persisted and thrived under constraint. Just as filmmakers worked within the boundaries of the Code to create powerful, lasting stories, we should approach the films entering the public ___domain each year with curiosity, nuance, and appreciation for their historical contexts. As we anticipate Hays Code-era films entering the public ___domain in 2030, we should also celebrate the wide array of pre-Code films still making their way into the public ___domain—such as Frankenstein, All Quiet on the Western Front, King Kong, numerous Marx Brothers films, and many more inventive short cartoons. The public ___domain continues to expand, and with it, our opportunity to rediscover and reinterpret the works of the past.
This post is published under a CC0 Waiver dedicating it to the public ___domain.
The internet is a living, breathing space—constantly growing, changing, and, unfortunately, disappearing. Important articles get taken down. Research papers become inaccessible. Historical records vanish. When content disappears, we lose pieces of our shared knowledge.
That’s where the Wayback Machine comes in. With the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now tool, you have the power to help preserve the web in real time.
Why It Matters:
Prevent Link Rot: Keep references intact for future research.
Preserve Digital History: Ensure cultural moments remain accessible.
Save What Matters to You: You choose what to archive and preserve.
Access to cultural heritage is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. Founded in 2005, LibriVox stands out as a crucial resource, ensuring that our cultural heritage is freely and openly accessible. With its mission “To make all books in the public ___domain available, narrated by real people and distributed for free, in audio format on the internet,” LibriVox brings thousands of texts to modern audiences in audio form. The site operates on a volunteer basis, with community members dedicating time to record and independently publish these works. Each audiobook is dedicated to the public ___domain upon publication, reinforcing free and unrestricted access to our cultural heritage and history.
LibriVox’s open structure supports preservation and accessibility. All of the recordings from the site cost nothing, have no limitations on listening time, and are devoid of DRM with the availability to download and keep forever. These positives are especially crucial as more aspects of our digital lives come under tighter corporate controls. The Internet Archive also serves and preserves the digital files in partnership with LibriVox and its community. We host a LibriVox collection full of audios, ensuring these adaptations are accessible.
On a personal note, LibriVox has enriched my own experiences with literature. Their dramatic recordings of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner—complete with full casts—have brought these beloved stories to life in new and vibrant ways for your ears. These audiobooks have not only made revisiting my favorite texts more convenient but have also deepened my appreciation for these texts. They also have become a reliable companion giving me something to listen to during insomnia-fueled nights of tossing and turning in bed.
History and shared culture are worth preserving. LibriVox’s mission helps to make that preservation more accessible, available, and engaging for us all. LibriVox works utilize books provided by Project Gutenberg, an organization dedicated to making public ___domain texts available. Take some time to explore our LibriVox Collection and see what stands out to you. You might even find your next favorite book. Or, consider helping to build this rich collection by volunteering with Librivox. Happy listening.
This post is published with a CC0 Waiver dedicating it to the public ___domain.
The following guest post from archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Soon after the cinema was born in the 1890s, a few visionaries realized that film could become one of the most vivid and engaging means of recording history. But when they proposed creating archives to collect and preserve moving images, no one seemed to respond. Most movie studios treated films as expendable objects to be discarded after their theatrical runs, and most collections that actually survived were hidden in specialized spaces: newsreel archives, stock footage libraries, universities, and collectors’ basements.
In the 1930s, a handful of courageous archivists in Europe and America inaugurated the modern film archives movement. Asserting that cinema should be seen not only as valuable documentation but as an art in its own right, they collected as best they could. But they encountered great resistance. They fought pushback from copyright holders who saw archives as a violation of their ownership, aesthetes and government bureaucrats who considered movies to be vulgar commercialism and unworthy of preservation, and fire inspectors who treated film as explosive hazmat. Ultimately, film’s immense popularity won out. In half a century, the first four film archives expanded to hundreds, and today it’s impossible to count how many thousands of archives collect film, video, and digital materials.
But film has always been hard to collect and preserve. Until the 1970s, film was generally made from organic gelatin bonded to various forms of plastic that inevitably decomposed. Much but not all pre-1951 35mm film was doubly vulnerable, made from cellulose nitrate stock that if heated or exposed to flame could burn rapidly or explode. Film, therefore, was and still is a deeply inconvenient object, requiring very cool and very dry storage in order to survive. Archives fires throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have destroyed large collections, and almost every film is still at risk from decay and decomposition.
For many years the gold standard of film preservation was film-to-film copying coupled with restoration—aiming to preserve films as their makers intended, and trying to preserve the theatrical film experience. This process is difficult and expensive. The turn toward digital technologies came in the 1990s, and now almost all film preservation is digitally-based, even if the product is a long-lasting film print for storage projection.
To think about film preservation is to think about much more than what we call movies. While to most people film and cinema describe the stories we see in theaters or on television, feature films are really a special case. The majority of films are “useful cinema”—films produced to do a job, to sell, train, teach, promote, document, convince. Almost none of these films have been preserved. And the supermajority of films, totalling in the billions, are home movies.
From the Prelinger Archives, “Home Movie: 003791,” preserved and available to view at the Internet Archive.
Home movies—8mm, Super 8, 9.5mm 16mm and even 35mm—are ancestors of the videos we shot on camcorders and now capture on cell phones. We might think of each home movie as a pixel in a giant collective documentary spanning a hundred years, endless films picturing family, friends, travels, rituals and celebrations. Home movies picture our own experience of daily life, work and leisure, rather than narratives cooked up by commercial studios. And every home movie is evidence: a gesture of permanence. While there are large collections of home movies, most still live with the families that made them, often in damp basements or hot attics, all vulnerable to deterioration and the vagaries of a changing climate. Of all films, home movies are the closest to our hearts, the most charismatic, the most fascinating—and they are in the greatest jeopardy.
Fortunately, we now have digital tools and workflows to extend the life of film. While scanning film to produce digital files demands considerable skill, technology, and resources, it is more achievable than ever before. It’s possible to digitize most films that have not completely decayed and turn these inconvenient reels into digital files that can be viewed, shared, studied, edited, and woven together with other images and sounds. It’s now easy to take a film that may exist in only a single copy and share it around the world via the internet.
Beginning in 2000, Prelinger Archives collaborated with Internet Archive to digitize and offer thousands of useful films online, and since then our films have been seen and downloaded over 200 million times on the Internet Archive and arguably billions of times elsewhere. Our three-year collaboration with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, now in progress, is allowing us to scan thousands of films (especially home movies) every year and make them available in a safer, decentralized environment where we hope they will survive for many years. While this is not classic film-to-film preservation creating restored film copies that sit on archival shelves, digital scans of films are likely to exist in many places, avoiding the vulnerability of unique copies in individual repositories. And the quality of digital scanning now exceeds the quality of film-to-film copying.
Perhaps most importantly, digital scans are easy to share. While film preservation should enable universal access to the sum of cinematic creativity, much film is enclosed by copyright or business restrictions. Most films held in archives are still not visible and even fewer are available for reuse. By scanning films that are out of copyright or have no surviving rightsholder, we can open up an immense reservoir of images, sounds and ideas for the makers of the present and the future. Scanning has made film preservation practical, and it’s also enabled preservation of “smaller” films like home movies and useful films, which reveal evidence and truths absent from feature films and television.
No film left unscanned: this is our dream. We have the opportunity to preserve deteriorating films in digital form and make them available for viewing, reuse, and computation as never before. As thoughtful archivists have said for many years, “preservation without access is pointless.” Digital scanning can and should enable both as it helps us to build moving and permanent memories.
About the author
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting “ephemeral films” (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called “useful cinema“) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 9,700 items) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. Prelinger Archives currently collaborates with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web to scan historical films and make them available online. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 30 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004, which continues to serve the needs of researchers, artists, activists and readers in downtown San Francisco. He is currently Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs.
An independent magazine published in New Orleans is proving that it’s possible to succeed without accepting advertising or putting up barriers requiring readers to pay for content.
In 2015, Nathan J. Robinson and Oren Nimni raised more than $16,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to launch Current Affairs, a print magazine featuring political analysis and satire. Its lean staff of six produces six issues a year, as well as a podcast and digital newsletter. To operate, the magazine relies on donations, grants and individual subscriptions—although its content is available to the public online for free.
Robinson said he’s motivated by the all-too-common and damaging problem that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free,” which he’s famously written about in the magazine. Outrageous stories and misinformation are easy to access, while factual news stories often require subscriptions to read.
“The moment you put in a paywall, you’re cutting down the potential audience—and you’re cutting it down to the people who are really committed, rather than those who need to read the piece the most. I want to reach the people who need to read it closely,” Robinson said. “It’s really important for democracy, because people need to be able to make informed decisions.”
Running a progressive magazine not backed by corporate interests gives the editorial staff latitude to tackle issues with a different lens, said Robinson, 35, who has a law degree and PhD in sociology. With so many distractions in the daily news, Current Affairs tries to keep people focused on what matters; for instance, critiquing how climate change policies should be addressed, and analyzing U.S. policy with Haiti over time. In 2023, Robinson wrote an article on the history of the New Masses magazine, exploring its mission as a left-leaning publication from 1926-1948.
“Being independent gives us so much creative freedom,” Robinson said. “We’re very experimental.”
Current Affairs has 3,000 subscribers (who pay about $70 a year), and staff work to build deep connections to secure their loyalty. Robinson hosts regular online Zoom sessions to get feedback from subscribers and extends an open invitation to stop by the magazine’s office in the Central Business District of New Orleans for a cup of tea.
Current Affairs covers
Robinson’s goal: cultivate a community that wants to support the publication, rather than thinking of subscribing as transactions. When there is a new project or initiative, the magazine reaches out to subscribers for additional donations and often finds they are responsive.
“We’re trying to demonstrate the viability of independent media,” Robinson said. “We hope we inspire others to believe it’s possible and not accept the conventional wisdom that you need to put content behind paywalls, because you don’t.”
Content is produced by three editors (the other staff members cover graphics and operations) and freelance writers. Robinson said salaries and payments for submissions are modest to keep costs down, with an annual budget of just $600,000. The publication relies on traffic from social media to attract new readers. The team is dedicated to do what it can to persuade others about policy and culture, he said, and provides easy access to the public to join in the discourse.
Robinson said the work of Current Affairs and the Internet Archive intersects, as both strive to remove barriers to knowledge.
“The Internet Archive functions as a library should, putting out a lot of raw information,” Robinson said. “Our job is to sift through the information. Collection is important, but analysis is also important.”
In his work, Robinson said he frequently turns to the Internet Archive. After finishing graduate school at Harvard University, he lost access to the campus library. “The Wayback Machine is unbelievably important to anyone who wants to seriously research anything, because stuff goes away,” he said.
Robinson co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky, The Myth of American Idealism, which was released by Penguin Random House last year. Since many of the books cited in endnotes were out of print, Robinson said the Internet Archive was invaluable in verifying sources.
Recently, the magazine became registered with the Internal Revenue Services as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. With that new designation, it began to seek additional support and just received its first grant from the Craigslist Foundation. The hope is to expand its funding to be able to hire reporters to do more original reporting, Robinson said.
New start-ups, especially in the media space, struggle to find a sustainable business model, but Current Affairs continues to grow: “It feels amazing to bring something into the world that isn’t like everything else,” he said. “We’ve been around for eight years now, and we’re going to stay around many more.”
