I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
Rather, they overextended themselves massively in a blunder akin to just throwing themselves on their enemy's sword. They decided to go all-or-nothing on uncontrolled digital lending when there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that the current laws would give them any wiggle room. And unsurprisingly, it will give them a mortal wound.
That means advocacy. That sometimes means civil disobedience and getting society to fight for them. You want an internet archive? We need to reform copyright law.
I know, I know, if you were them and had bought bitcoin at $10 you would have sold at precisely the top at $70k per and neither before nor after.
If they were straight up ignoring or rejecting DMCA takedown requests, then that would be a self-immolation that is similarly pyrrhic to the uncontrolled digital lending operation.
Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.
You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.
By all means, romanticize recklessness even when it results in self-defeating catastrophe. Yet there are plenty of other worthier figures to lionize and archives to patronize- Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, the anonymous samizdat dissidents and LibGen.
In fact, I'll tell you what, you make it and I will dedicate my ArchiveTeam Warrior to your project instead for a year.
Obviously the law needs to be changed.
A lot of people smoking weed is certainly a component for the prohibition to fail at some point.
Writing mails to legislative members isn't enough if you don't have any form of leverage.
It requires that people refuse plea deals and demand jury trials, and that the jury is educated on what jury nullification is but when prosecutors can't get a conviction regardless of much evidence they have of guilt the laws will get changed or at least they stop being enforced.
That's not an admirable underdog fight and it's not a glorious martyrdom, it's at best a naive slip up and at worst an ignoble organizational suicide attempt.
Change isn't going to happen because people recklessly throw themselves against the draconian laws and get annihilated by them—it will happen when people strategically set up a battle that they can win or persuade Congress to fix it.