Thank you Internet Archive. I donate, and it's a small club, EFF, FSF, and a few others.

(Why did the ACLU step away from what made them great? Just a side bar, but WTF? We need that more than ever right now!!)

Please consider supporting the archive. Many here are discussing why. I think I want to just say our digital history is important. As I get older and see how far we have come, I seem to value our roots more. And that means I value the archive more.

In my view, this works like our very early history did. We, as a species, didn't develop the tech needed to communicate our early history until too late to really get the golden lessons possible from it! And this may be a general law of some sort we will find out in the future when we've got a sample size greater than ourselves. I really suspect it is. Why bother talking about this?

The same might be true for digital tech. Once people move to this level of abstraction, basically running history and the machinery of the people digitally, one step removed from the rules of the world, basic materials, means, methods, the rapid pace of change and the implications of non-human readable information technology really mean just take a while to sink in. By the time it does, it's gonna be late --too late perhaps. We are gonna just make it, and still will have lost a lot, but not so much we can't glean the golden lessons from our past. The Internet Archive is going to be a part of that success.

This SMART act isn't smart. And part of the struggle here, in addition to the tech issues and our failure to grok how it will play out, also leaves room for bad law. A. LOT. OF. BAD. LAW. Case in point, infringement vs theft. Many simplify this down to theft. And hey, no judgement! Many of the reasons are not unreasonable. And some of the intent is right there too. However, the fact is we have the word infringement because the important parts of theft, the very things that make theft need to have a word, are not part of infringment!!

I don't want to derail this. Piracy is bad. 'nuff said, other than it's also necessary because law, society and tech are misaligned right now. Above, I said we are going to just make it, in the sense of capturing our own history with enough fidelity to learn from it, get the benefit of having done it all.

And despite that being true, we are still going to make more bad laws, this one being the primary example of the day. Making money can be put above everything and there is real, consistent and effective pressure to do that every day too. But, the people do matter more. They are why making money makes any sense at all, and our history matters more, because that is where the good lessons, insight is, and it's where our stories are. Lives are stories and they all have value, but we only realize that value when the stories get told, shared, talked about, explored, learned from.

I bet we see theft plugged in where infringment should be. It's happened every time, and bad word use leads to bad laws and that happens because when we use the wrong words --we simplify just a bit too much so as to bias the process and everyone's thinking toward the preferred goal, we make law that is not well aligned to realities. Everyone is basically worse off for it having happened too. Even the people who wanted the law, though they may not realize it for a good long while.

Worse? What happens with laws people do not respect? That's right, they get ignored, violated, and the original purpose for the law gets lost in the noise, leaving us with kind of a mess we know is supposed to be doing good somehow, but it isn't doing that good, or so little of it we may ask, "why did we even bother?" And the answer will either be, "nobody knows", or something along the lines of what I am writing right now.

Use the right words, which will lead to better, or arguably the right law, or even better, law that aligns with realities well enough to stand on it's own and be obvious in purpose, mutually respected and abided by as it all should be.

Thanks again Internet Archive for making this more visible.