In light of the fire at the Internet Archive's offices this week, I found this Medium post strangely prescient, and in particular the following comments:
>> "The decision to put the servers on display is an aesthetic one, clearly. But there’s a security aspect as well. In the short term, the servers are at risk of having some idiot walk up and damage them. So far, no one has and Kahle isn’t too worried about that. He’s more concerned about the long term. He’s thinking in decades and centuries.
>> “What happens to libraries is that they’re burned,” says Kahle, “and they’re typically burned by governments.”
>> He knows the Internet Archive is unlikely to be literally set to torch by American agents, but as the place dances on the edges of copyright law, the possibility that it’ll be shut down by a stroke of judicial pen looms large.
P.S. I'm not implying any kind of conspiracy theory here at all.
>> "The decision to put the servers on display is an aesthetic one, clearly. But there’s a security aspect as well. In the short term, the servers are at risk of having some idiot walk up and damage them. So far, no one has and Kahle isn’t too worried about that. He’s more concerned about the long term. He’s thinking in decades and centuries.
>> “What happens to libraries is that they’re burned,” says Kahle, “and they’re typically burned by governments.”
>> He knows the Internet Archive is unlikely to be literally set to torch by American agents, but as the place dances on the edges of copyright law, the possibility that it’ll be shut down by a stroke of judicial pen looms large.
P.S. I'm not implying any kind of conspiracy theory here at all.