[kristopolous]

It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance.

I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control.

It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste.

Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.

[grumbel]

What I'd like to see is a global repository of just pure metadata, file hashes, descriptions, thumbnails, everything you can get away with under the current law. That way you could organize all the data freely and publicly, while you could leave the retrieval to other, potential illegal, parties (torrent, IPFS, random websites, ...).

But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there.

The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.

[jraph]

> It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance.

Name suggestion: Hist-Hub

[miah_]

Or maybe archive.org..

[xg15]

Or maybe more like a SciHub/LibGen for historians.