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. 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.

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, you know, nothing with life or death stakes, just that the MTV News.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 freelance 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 when I started

freelancing I was writing for the Chicago Reader which didn't really even have an

online version it was just. I would go and

pick up the paper version and I got myself this kind of like leather book that you put

the you know has like the cellophane and you put the clippings in and this is a big ritual for me when I published a new piece

...