You're conflating archiving and archive maintenance here. There are great arguments that can still be made for funding by charging for access the people who sea

You're conflating archiving and archive maintenance here. There are great arguments that can still be made for funding by charging for access the people who search out rare and wonderful things and create fine copies of those things for people to enjoy. Taking an old film from being found in a barn or an attic to a beautifully restored video is sacred, and if people stop doing it films burn and books rot. Maintenance of a digital archive? Just put it out there with no legal threats or restrictions and let the right people download it once or twice. It'll last forever. Instead, everything is tied up in restricted access, legal knots or just the impression of legal knots. Eventually local hard drives will be as illegal as the RIAA wanted to make blank cassette tapes. All of your data will have to be in clouds managed by state-intimate monopolies to insure future legal compliance. Datahoarders, academics, filmmakers and others would build communities around peer-to-peer film archives with no legal encumbrances.