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.