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by mjmahone17 4599 days ago
This is essentially what Alexandria used to do: any ship coming to port with any books on board was required to give the library at Alexandria those books for as long as it took for their scribes to copy them. The library then gave the ship owners the copied version (because hey, data is data, what does it matter if you have the original or secondhand copy?)

This helped propel a lot of the world's best ancient thinkers, including Euclid, Archimedes and Eratosthenes.