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I mean, their mission statement is "universal access to all knowledge". They had to push these boundaries because it's their purpose. The boundaries themselves are dumb and arbitrary (see e.g. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...). Maybe the publishers are deserving of more criticism than the Archive here?



Just because something is in your organization's mission statement does not require you to make imprudent and likely suicidal decisions in pursuit of it. That is not a means to accomplish your cause but rather a means to harm it.

But in our time it seems like there is no such thing as a prudent leader of any organization who understands just how high you can fly without pulling an Icarus and flying into the sun. Even those who know better fear the fanatics enough that they cannot tell them no since those who recommend moving with caution are branded as enemies of the cause and marginalized by the fanatics. And then people wonder why everything seems to end in disaster. The Internet Archive is far from the only institution to make this particular category of error.


I mean if I poke an angry drunk and he beats the tar out of me, the angry drunk certainly deserves criticism but all of my friends will be "WTF why did you go and poke him?"


Publishers acting as angry dunks, checks out.


I mean, in a way poking an angry drunk makes more sense given that the angry drunk might get arrested for battery.

In my estimation, there is zero chance that any positive change that IA might want out of the publishing company will come from the emergency lending program, and there's a non-zero chance that the IA will get shutdown because of it.


Sounds like it's time for a team of burly armed men to subdue the angry drunk by force.


Have the risky stuff done by another legal entity perhaps?


Creating proxy entities to protect oneself is only available to people who hold a lot of capital.


The IA easily could have done it.


Perhaps they're attempting to relate to the world that everyone has to live in, rather than the reality of capital.




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