> There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge
This is objectively false. There zero actual harm being done here. There is very little, if any, evidence that the vast majority of the 500k removed books contain information that actually provides value to people, as opposed to being fiction and political advocacy non-fiction (for instance, the vast majority of the list of 1300 "banned and challenged books" (that contains many duplicates and is shorter than IA claims)[1] that the IA is clutching their pearls over are almost exclusively non-informational) that result in zero harm when taken away from people.
You also pointedly ignored the fact that the greatest repository of knowledge in human history, by orders of magnitude, is the Internet - even if you restrict yourself to the parts that people have voluntarily made free, you still have the ability to learn everything you need to live a comfortable life, and learn more than you have time for in a thousand lifetimes.
Demanding that the entertainment works that authors wrote with the express intention of making money (and who did not consent to their work being put on IA) be made freely available, regardless of the massive amount of information already voluntarily made free on the Internet that serves almost every need you have (learning to sew, fixing a leak, doing your taxes, getting the equivalent of a PhD in math), is the absolute peak of entitlement.
The only vaguely reasonable vector adjacent to your argument is that academic publishers make their papers freely available, because that's actual human knowledge (and because the funding for the research doesn't come from the publishers).
> We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors.
Now you're just advocating communism, which is one of the actual greatest human follies of all time, and has resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the suffering of hundreds of millions more.
This comment is utterly inappropriate for HN. It is naked political advocacy that is emotionally manipulative, factually incorrect, and contains zero content that aligns with HN's goals of "stimulating intellectual curiosity".
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6S...