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by dowager_dan99 386 days ago
honest question to all: how do you keep pushing boundaries once you've been successful enough to transition from a scrappy activist with nothing to lose to foundational infrastructure? I get the simple answer is reduced risks, stop doing the things that made you successful, but is there another path? Surely if OpenAI can somehow go from benevolent saviour of humanity to naked profit megacorp we can find a way for the IA to keep taking big risks?
2 comments
lolinder 386 days ago
Why does it need to be the Internet Archive that takes big risks?

In the startup space it's common for a founder to, after a successful launch, hand off control of the organization to someone else who's better equipped to drive the company in slow and steady mode. If the people in charge of the Internet Archive feel like they're best equipped to be revolutionaries rather than maintaining the ground they won in the past, maybe it's time for them to transition into a new organization and hand off the IA to people who are able to run it in maintenance mode.

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freedomben 386 days ago
There is plenty they can still do to push boundaries and be activists, but their decision was really quite reckless. At their current level of importance, they need to be progressives, not revolutionaries. They essentially took up arms against the industry using covid as an excuse. Well, I personally despise the IP industry and think that it needs radical reform, if not complete destruction, we have to live to fight another day as well. Unless they really thought covid was truly going to kill us all and wipe us all off the planet, it was a short-sighted move on their part.

Now that's sad, I hope they learned their lesson, and I think we should all step up to help defend them. Aside from donations, I think people should be making a large amount of noise at their elected representatives to start reforming the ridiculous IP framework in the United States. The whole point of copyright and other protections was to ensure that there was some incentive to people to produce content and be able to monetize it. I think it's ludicrous to suggest that you need such an utterly long period with a shark full of teeth to go after people in order to incentivize the producing of content.

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