Terabytes upon terabytes of historical data would vanish if the IA were to go bankrupt.
IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers!
Fuck everyone who's saying IA shouldn't do this. You're all seeing the world through your wallets.
Just a crazy thought: they weren't just depriving publishers of revenue, they were directly depriving authors. People already not widely renowned as rolling in the dollars, and also hurt during a time of decreased discretionary spending.
But they don't count as people, right?
Bankruptcy doesn't mean dissolution. If the IA goes bankrupt over this National Emergency Library boondoggle, the servers will still be around. A new organization could lift them out, clean them up and re-launch the service with a more focussed mandate and better internal processes.
Presumably, they legally hold those data. As such, it could be purchased by a new organization out of bankruptcy (assuming IA loses and goes into liquidation versus restructuring).
... please watch this 30 second Google ad to retrieve your archived content...
The IA should be protected from governments.
I do believe however that they're after a precedent being set, and though I'm definitely not a lawyer, I know that at least for brands and trademarks, you have to defend your property or lose it. The same might apply to their literary IP. If IA does it, then 'anyone else can do it', in which case the entire value of publishers business is vaporized.
My instinct is that the publishers want the IA to 'stop doing it' and the situation will likely end up something along those lines.