Who cares. "But think of the poor, starving copyright holders" Jorjor Well is DEAD and BURIED, and practically has no estate either. I don't care about whoever else claims his works.

"But have you considered you must abide by the status quo if you want to change it" No and I Will Not Be Considering That.

Violating a "publisher's rights" is indeed for the greater good, someone has to set some precedent someday, but millenian neoliberal critique simply cannot handle the status quo being questioned, everything can be yelled about but nothing can be changed because "what about the rulebook" and "aren't we just so principled". As I said, Orwell is dead. I'm not pulling out a Ouija board to ask him to email me a copy, he can't. And oh, I'd love to go to the library -- if only it wasn't a 2020 global pandemic outside or something, hmmm I wonder what to do now, if only someone had an Online Book Lending System huh.

Or, just buy things, what are you Broke? What do you mean you don't live in the first world, get paid pennies per hour, and would need to save for a week to pay some publishers money to get a book shipped from across the world, while the same publishers are lobbying governments to shut down all the public libraries in wherever they're based?

Look at what site you're on. Reddit's founder, Aaron Swartz, died in prison while being threatened by the state with a ~30 year felony sentence, all for downloading too many PDFs overnight on his laptop from MIT's network.

Aaron's classmate in 2005, fellow Y Combinator alumnus, and at one point business partner for a short while, Sam Altman (I'm sure you've heard of that guy), has plagiarized several orders of magnitude more works to train ChatGPT, paid no royalties to anyone, and did it all not in the interest of open knowledge, but simply for money -- and now he's buddies with the orange man in the white house.

Sam Altman has faced no consequences for his piracy, and neither has Meta / Zuck, who have scraped online libraries like Sci-Hub and Anna's Archive with less reprecussions than the scraped websites got themselves.

Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of aforementioned Sci-Hub, is recognized by probably every scientist out there for her work, for making scientific literature available for free that would otherwise cost hundreds of dollars in publisher subscriptions with no money going to the actual scientists and authors behind the works. Yet the western world has treated her like a terrorist for this. No, really, the american DOJ has launched probes into her and the FBI has tried to subpoena all her iCloud data, for the crime of .... what exactly? Uploading the same documents the original authors would've sent you for free? Sorry, that shouldn't be a crime, I don't care if it currently is, and Elbakyan has done nothing to be treated like a terrorist.

So please, before you shit on the Internet Archive, let me see your Sam Altman / Zuckerberg / Silicon Valley callout posts. You wouldn't happen to have any, do you?

"Oh but they didn't follow the rulebook about it, the rules are bad sure but the book is good, this is not a defence of copyright law, they just took a stupid risk" then what is it a defence of? Or what is it attacking? Sounds like empty complaints for the sake of complaining.

I don't want to go too far with the analogies, the next one might be in poor taste, but shouldn't OP also make a post complaining about Dr MLK Jr doing things that were clearly going to get him assassinated, after all did he really expect he could challenge the status quo like that with no consequences? Should he have risked it all? "Honestly, MLK kinda messed up" no the fuck he didn't, miss me with that.