I'm intimately familiar with Creative Commons licensing; all of my hobby writing work is posted under CC BY-SA 3.0 so it can be built upon by others in a collaborative fiction project. I love that CC was brought up in class as an example of a "social contract", but it's essential to acknowledge also that it's legally binding. Creative Commons licensing is protected by copyright law in North America and the other nations that observe it, but as the article says: if society is not willing to enforce those legalities, and the government is not incentivized to protect these legal policies, then the law holds no weight. Even in Teacher's College, I have seen all of the principles of academic content reuse ignored by some professors. In Pedagogy of the Arts last year, we were actively required to take educational resources wholesale from the internet and submit them, without any transformative usage of the resources, for a culminating assessment. Teacher candidates are actively being encouraged to violate copyright law by instructors who don't understand what they're doing.

So: I've been meaning to donate to Wikipedia for a long time. I have used it frequently for nearly twenty years and consider it one of the last and most crucial bastions of unbiased and well-written truth in the current societal moment. While I have seen Wikipedia's messaging asking for donations many times, I am often too preoccupied by my own research pursuits to get around to donating. Reading this passage was a real call to action for me; learning that Wikipedia isn't just struggling to acquire donations to the extent that any non-profit does, but that it is actually being targeted for destruction by corporations in the information age, spurred me to pause my reading of this article and immediately make a donation. Wikimedia Commons provides a wealth of essential resources, including CC and Public Domain assets I have used in academic and creative projects. To learn that its use is being supplanted by LLMs to a harmful extent is truly disheartening.

This is one of many examples where the article does not pull its punches. It uses politically charged and highly opinionated language, which will likely seem compelling to readers who align politically with what has been read so far, but will also likely push away readers who are differently opinionated. This isn't necessarily a critique, as this is an opinion piece which I personally feel is right to use provocative statements of this nature. I believe that the Internet Archive is, on the whole, a public good that is essential for historical research, and for ensuring accountability of the corporations and other powerful institutions increasingly in control of these platforms.