We can only expect these trends to continue to worsen, and many works to be lost well before they enter the public domain.

We are on the eve of a revolution in preservation, but “the lost cannot be recovered.” We have a critical window of about 5-10 years during which it’s still fairly expensive to operate a shadow library and create many mirrors around the world, and during which access has not been completely shut down yet.

If we can bridge this window, then we’ll indeed have preserved humanity’s knowledge and culture in perpetuity. We should not let this time go to waste. We should not let this critical window close on us.

Let’s go.

  • Anna and the team
  • @pmk
    link
    English
    123 months ago

    What can an ordinary user do at this point that would help?

      • @pmk
        link
        English
        23 months ago

        The archive team sounds interesting!

    • Verdant Banana
      link
      fedilink
      English
      23 months ago

      archive, archive, archive

      got a 30tb library currently and every time a drive goes down we replace with a drive that is bigger

      • @pmk
        link
        English
        13 months ago

        How do you decide what to archive, and what is the long term plan? If Annas goes down it can be pieced together again? Or is it served to users now too?

  • adr1an
    link
    fedilink
    English
    12 months ago

    If only some billionaire trained a GPT model on all copyrighted books, with the twist of really being able to return the whole content ;)

    It would be legal, tho IANAL.