I listened to the talk given by Brewster Kahle, a personal hero of mine. I've long been a fan of his work at the Internet Archive. I've made a lot of use of the Open-Source movie area and the Prelinger Archive, two of the projects he mentions in the talk.

A theme he keeps coming back to is the Library of Alexandria. We're going through a period where we could have a tragedy on the scale of that great burning. Kahle covers the technical, legal, and moral requirements that we must fulfill to avoid this catastrophe.

The big idea of his is that we can get universal access to human knowledge. It could be up there, his says, with the big achievements of our history, including the Gutenberg Bible. But to do it, not only do we need a relatively modest amount of funds, but we need the social will to push back the proprietary obsession and liberate (and rescue) the work of our generation.