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< Burning the library of Alexandria
I recalled "Torching the Modern Day Library of Alexandria" from The Atlantic that covered the court-ordered dismantling of Google Books, and their huge investment in "digitizing every written piece of work in existence". Obviously, it was drowning in copyright violations and was shot down in court quickly. They devised amazing aways of digitizing (and making searchable) all written content: different ways of having machines recognize a books page thickness and size and weight, the angles and levels used for such and such book, so their machines were not just tearing apart the pages. How they obtained different documents, etc. Hell of a read. ironically, the court ordered them to stop copying, and not ditribute (even for free) any of it, but not destroy what was digitized, so a handful of Google employees can (theoretically) go through and access what they got stored. Est 35% of all written works were put on their servers. Insane.
Also, Google is terrible now, for the better they didn't get everything copied, and (in all likelyhood) overrun libraries, only for a Google Library *fee* instead. I'll take libraries (and physical books).
Copyright! The great mafia that, as elites tend to do, aims to keep information in chains in order to mantain an artificial market for the sake of, you guessed it, circulating money. If money stops it's endless cycles those who do nothing will perish, that cannot be allowed!
I have no sympathy for Google whatsoever, their digitizing sounds like a noble enterprise, and apparently it was at least being done with care. I do remember seeing a documentary about that effort. But, as implied, such a "noble" work done by an evil conglomerate is not any less evil.
I am happy to ilegally download as much copyrighted material as possible, and I think that is a good thing to do, and everybody should strive to do that. Then, if you really like a book and want to benefit the author, you can always buy the book, but we shouldn't be kept from reading it just because we haven't paid for it. Back to the 10 Cabala books, am I going to pay for each of them just to peruse it to see if it is worth keeping?
There is an even better way to "pay" for those books, and it is to keep the tradition alive, to keep them around for when the actual burning of the alexandrian library that is the internet does indeed burn in the next great political maneuver, and of course, to disseminate them as far and wide as possible.
And let the copyright elites die a million deaths. Hopefully, they'll be trapped in the building and share the destiny of their precious "property".