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Well, there’s having to put an unconstitutional demand violating the 1st/4th amendments on paper and sending it out to a company, and then there’s just being able to log in as the admin and look for the information directly. Anyway, when I say “public good”, I mean in a pretty loose sense, I prefer to see actual maintenance/management done by something like a non-profit rather than a gov agency.
I was about to write something in my comment to the effect of, “but let’s not even talk about the government running it”. Could end up like PBS, could just as easily end up like USSR/North Korean/Chinese media. Imagine Reddit but, instead of spez, it’s Joseph McCarthy, or Donald Trump, with the power to identify and criminally sanction users.
Archival is extremely important and one of the side effects of copyright schemes is that they limit its viability. The less access people have, the more likely some work becomes lost forever. I’ve seen it a few times already, with recent work, but in one or two hundred years we’re talking about libraries of art that could have been preserved but are just gone.
Closed source software, that’s actually distributed to people, has all kinds of problems beyond that too. Tons has been written about that, but from an artistic perspective, I think the biggest loss is that people can’t legally expand the original work. Giant franchises with a central cultural presence get walled off and usually just go through a huge creative decline, which is crazy because there’s millions of people preoccupied with the concepts from the franchise who are barred from using them to express themselves. With software in specific, if it’s open source you can modify it, fix it, expand it, maintain it, whatever - there’s all these great resources they could use, but we won’t let them.
That is what Aleph One is. https://alephone.lhowon.org/ Plus there’s a good number of user-made scenarios for it too.
Including Montana.