Access drives preservation. So, if you think of, "well, why don't we just go and encrypt it and put it in a vault, and we'll be able to look at it in 70 years, or something like that...", I think that kind of a "dark archive" is the worst possible idea.

I think it's keeping things in use, active, that keeps a part of the mind-share, keeps people knowing about it, liking it, caring for it. So I think that the best way to preserve things is to make things accessible. It may sound a little... "un-obvious", but especially in this digital age, where it's so easy to forget... If you take things away for a generation, it's as if it doesn't exist. So everything we do is open-source, and all the things we do we try to give away.

Brewster Kahle's words on preserving knowledge at the Internet Archive. I think they also briefly explain exactly what is wrong with overly-extended copyright terms, overzealous enforcement, and legal protections on DRM.