destroy individual
collections, but nothing in history has been able to destroy the idea of the
universal library, open for all.
For the better part of that history, the idea was simply impossible. Today it
is simply illegal. But in an era when books are everywhere, the total archive
is already here. Distributed among millions of hard drives, it already is a
_de facto_ common heritage. We are as gods, and might as well get good at
it.[6]
## About the author
**Bodo Balazs,** PhD, is an economist and piracy researcher at the Institute
for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. [More
»](https://limn.it/researchers/bodo/)
## Footnotes
[1] On such fora, one can ask for and receive otherwise out-of-reach
publications through various reddit groups such as
[r/Scholar](https://