All that’s fine and good, but isn’t going to help them negotiate with publishers, or get better copyright legislation.
I also think liberties have been branding themselves as politically progressive for a long time - since long before the digital age.
This has left them with few friends, as progressivism returns to its roots as an upper middle-class ideology.
This is so sad. I spend so much time growing up in libraries. Been locked up there accidentally more than once.
I'm of the mind there should be a place he could do that safely and easily, but that place shouldn't be the library.
Libraries are one of the precious few places where one is not charged on entry or otherwise expected to buy something. Even public parks are increasingly hostile to the homeless, but often no real alternatives are offered. And I think that's a shame.
[0] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/cdph/provdrs/health_pr...
Libraries are also used as a free Starbucks to work in.
no, this is obscene degrees of victim-blaming here. the modern copyright regime predates the internet being a major commercial vector for anything by literally decades. the DAT tape wars were 80s, the VHS/Betamax time-shifting wars were 70s. taping off the radio was 60s.
obviously as the noose tightens, more and more activity becomes "criminal", so the "criminal activity" stats probably do go up over time, but that doesn't inherently reflect some change in social mores as much as the legal framework changing out from underneath it. and that was not initiated by anything to do with the internet - this really dates back to the "taping off the radio" days and the blowback from studios who didn't like that, and retrenched in the 80s and particularly the 90s.
Are you talking about legal challenges?
For popularity VHS was the 80's I think: "JVC released the first VHS machines in Japan in late 1976, and in the United States in mid-1977." and took a few years to take off widely.
Interestingly enough, VHS was developed in secret at JVC: "However, despite the lack of funding, Takano and Shiraishi continued to work on the project in secret. By 1973, the two engineers had produced a functional prototype.". The development of blue LEDs has a better story. Does Japanese culture encourage secrative development?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
Remarkably, Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers' Neighborhood) supported the VCR (for time shifting) and the Supreme Court took that into account.
And it would be more or less irrelevant that they didn't, because the massive amount of information made voluntarily available for free on the internet vastly outweighs the initial few centuries of libraries' existence by several orders of magnitude.