The Right to Read (1997)
I really enjoy having copies of all of the content I consume locally. It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. It's there when I lose Internet, it is there if I stop paying for various subscriptions, and it is there even if companies receive takedown notices, or otherwise just remove content for arbitrary reasons with no transparency or warning.It's sad how difficult it is becoming for users to actually own any of their own files. We don't own our music, we use spotify. We don't own our videos, we use Youtube. We don't even own the things we write ourselves, we use Twitter, Medium, Facebook, Discord, and more, and as of more recently, we sometimes do not even own hardware that we purchase ourselves (far too many examples)!youtube-dl being taken down today due to DMCA is a great showcase in how user-hostile the end-game here may actually be: you cannot own anything yourself, and must only access it on the terms of many very large parties (corporations, governments, laws, IP, etc), whose interests are not only not aligned with yours, but often completely inversed.You never know when your favorite content on the Internet may completely disappear. Youtube videos get taken down, github repositories and all of their forks get removed, sometimes personal accounts for services such as Facebook or Google are deleted permanently and with no recourse, and sometimes even entire websites and services go dark, whether they shut down, are deplatformed, or get DMCA'd.While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users, I will continue to do so myself until I'm not longer able to.