What’s unfortunate is a significant number of people don’t like hearing this and instead choose to project onto other countries. Most of our governments aren’t our friends, regardless if you’re American or not.

Realities like this one are forcing entire nations to move to FOSS, more accountable systems, etc., which is a good thing for many of us, but bad for those who are in jurisdictions that they just can’t get enough of Microsoft et al.

A far journey ahead but at least we’re getting there!

Had a similar conversation over in Mastodon recently and yeah, this is a very fair point. The indiscriminate scanning and publication of copyrighted books shouldn’t have happened in the first place, especially when there are existing ecosystems for ethical lending/leasing/borrowing of books already in place, which benefit and are working with authors/publishers already.

What’s frustrating is that the ones who claimed to have done this are self-proclaimed “hacktivists”. You’re stupid if you think the Internet Archive is the enemy in this day and age.