this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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This is why piracy is preservation. Torrents are just really damn good for this sort of thing.
This equivocates piracy and bittorrent tech as stated. That’s lame.
It does not, and that was not the intent with what I said.
I'm saying piracy (in general, as a practice) is preservation, because torrents help preserve media since they inherently allow for more resilient, redundant, decentralized hosting that isn't reliant on a provider, like Myrient, which can just shut down.
What I'm not saying is that piracy and torrenting are the same thing, that torrents are only for piracy, or that this is piracy.
If libraries did not exist and you purposed them today, you would be labeled a pirate and likely used into oblivion by the 3 or 4 massive companies that "own" all media. It's not strange that there is an overlap in the tools needed to preserve media in a robust, distributed way, and the tools used to distribute movies, music, and books.
I appreciate the sentiment, not the first time I heard this idea.
Question: is that not a strawman argument?
You present a hypothetical, one that has never occurred afaik, and argue that this illustrates the contradicting nature of the definition of libraries?
I hope I misunderstood, please elaborate.
Archive.org is the largest digital library, a very new concept, that I know of and they are constantly being sued.
They are being sued for existing, not proposing a novel idea, yes?
Proposing to make a second ever library is quite different from proposing the first ever (hence never seen before) library, I imagine it would be different that is. I do not in fact know.
There is a Defcon talk on libraries and the threat they face from government and capitalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJT6_OcY_dc