A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993)
The cycle of building, burning, and rebuilding the Great Digital Libraries of Alexandria (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay, Demonoid, what.cd, redacted, etc.) has gotten old.At this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation.There must be policy wonks here on HN who know the ins and outs of local/state/federal government, copyright law/fair use, etc. (I'm assuming the U.S. IP lobby is the 400 pound gorilla in the room.)What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts? What's an approach that could eventually be on a referenda or party platform? Does archive.org have any idea? Any other orgs have an idea?There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.What's the reasonable legislation to say, "As long as the project does X and avoids Y, the project may archive Z" for all digital artifacts Z in some domain?Edit: clarifications