The US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving".

Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.

We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.

This ship has sailed for academic publications, and academics define that term very liberally because we want to read everything, fiction included. The shadow libraries started off as a way for scholars in ex-Soviet countries in particular (but also India, SE Asia, etc.) to access literature that simply wasn’t available in their country. But the shadow libraries proved so successful and convenient that academics in all countries are using them now, even if they have access to official subscription services. I use AA several times a day and so do the researchers around me in my office; at conferences, if the presenter mentions an interesting publication, the whole room immediately opens AA on their laptops, etc.

Even if projects like AA didn’t have nation-level support, academics would find a way to keep as much of it as possible going. After all, we’re the ones who compiled the bulk of pre-2020 material, and we’re the ones who do all the hard work of scanning from our institutional libraries stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere in digital form.

>the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.

Most of the best literature in the English language was written before modern IP law was even a thing. There's very little good literature written by authors primarily motivated by money.

Possibly but this act of governmental self-harm is useful to The People. We live in a world where if your valuation is ~1T you can more or less just do what you like. And the work of The People is stolen from you and launderd.

In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies?

(Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).

>We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain

We already did that when the internet collectively agreed decades ago that everything digital should be free for anyone.

We're now 20 years downstream of ad-blocking being a virtuous good, and piracy being the ultimate show of liberty, and now suddenly everyone cares about the creator's revenue stream.

The mask slipped and unsurprisingly the internet is a bunch of selfish morally stunted children. Some of them even pushing 50 years old.

Yes, I am talking to you with the 4TB of pirated content, proud of not loading any ads in the last 15 years, and getting enraged over LLM training.