Comment by JudgeWapner
7 years ago
the only reason they exist now is because they're grandfathered in. We could have the exact same thing, just digitally, but due to copyright that will never happen.
The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no reason they can't cut or reduce their physical presence and publish their entire library online. Except instead of knowledge, it's now "content", and instead of readers, its now "consumers". Everything is a "market" that needs to be "captured" and libraries are a threat to this corporate model. From a purely informational standpoint, pages-bound-with-glue are just low-tech forms of hardware dongles.
There are a lot of things that wouldn't exist if they weren't grandfathered in.
I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines.
And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today.
And then there are guns.
At the risk of sounding too conservative for HN, this 'grandfathering' is an invaluable means of insulating societal infrastructure from the tyranny of cultural value shift.
I'm mulling over "cultural value shift".
Maybe some of it is that. But a lot of traditional rights of the general public are too easily overcome by dedicated funded interests via lawmakers and regulators.
Like or hate trump, but his "to make a new regulation, you first need to repeal two regulations" thing was pretty interesting.
I think there need to be more checks and balances than simple grandfathering architected into things when rights are lost.