alt Hacker NewsPhysical books and digital content is special in that you can mostly archive their content almost permanently for cheap. Buildings, paintings, idols, living things, natural features of the environment ... not so much.
So the solution is:
- mandatory copyright registration and renewal with links to where the work can be acquired
- a blanket carve out for any non-commercial trust-style org so that they can scan books etc and keep the data on their servers. They should be able to issue digital membership cards for a fee so that patrons can access the archives. Any work that is "live" based on the registration database will be locked. All "dead" material can be shared with members.
In this way, a hundred digital preservation societies can bloom.
> copyright
This is what caused the problem in the first place. If people had unrestricted access to content then the world would be a better place. And works wouldn't be so rare that it's worth AI companies buying and destroying them to gain some edge, as well as remain in legal compliance.