Libraries dont keep all periodicals and dont keep them forever. And microfilm is really lossy, unreliable, and difficult to search.

I'm not sure what microfilm has got to do with this. Plenty of national libraries have extensive digital collections of various artifacts - books and even websites. Check out the National Library of Australia as an example: https://www.library.gov.au/discover/what-we-collect/archived...

To hell with contempt of business model. Business models aren't sacred. Besides which, with business models owners capture the newsroom anyway.

As a news publisher (RedBankGreen.com) I’ll tell you that pretty much nobody is in it for the money anymore, at least at the local level.

It’s passion and love of the community, despite the many struggles and drawbacks.

AI bots scrape our content and that drastically reduces the number of people who make it to our site.

That impacts our ability to bring on subscribers and especially advertisers - Google and Meta own local advertising and AI kills the relatively tiny audience we have.

I dread the day that it happens in realtime - hear sirens? Ask AI who already scraped us.

Every business (even news) needs a business model.

Yes, but not every business works, and not every business model works, and not every business model works with every business, etc etc.

It's on the business to find a model that works within the environment of the free market and within the social framework.

If a business model only works by limiting competition, it's a bad model.

If it only works by limiting the rights of consumers, it's a bad model.

If it only works by blocking a legal activity (website crawling and scraping of publicly-facing data, for instance), it's a bad model.

And if their business can't operate otherwise, it's a bad business. No business has an intrinsic right to exist.

If a business model only works by copyright washing is it a bad model?

> No business has an intrinsic right to exist.

Do AI businesses have an intrinsic right to exist?

Absolutely don't, and I've argued since day 1 that by refusing to try to contract for training before they just ripped it, each and every one of them should be saddled with so much legal liability as to not exist. The capitalist overlords however, will grasp at anything that promises them of being free of dealing with labor...so... Here we are.

I think the question of is a business allowed to have something free only for humans (presumably with advertising) does not have a clear best answer - politicians can decide.

News has a business model: do actual journalism. I don't see much reason to fund the people who are giving me the same story as everyone else who received the same press release, with no additional details: I might as well subscribe to the press releases.

And people wonder why we’re all locked in a race to the bottom.

If they don't have a business model we won't have newspapers to complain that we don't have archives for.