Seriously great question at this point. In 2016 it was commonly accepted knowledge that if Putin released a video of Trump getting pissed on by a woman in a Moscow hotel, that would be the end of his political career.

Since then, he’s been found to be a rapist in court, has attempted to overthrow the government, and has been found guilty of about 3 dozen felonies with more charges pending - which doesn’t matter any way since Trump’s judges have granted him legal immunity to anything he wants to do. And he was just convincingly reelected with his party winning both the House and Senate.

He is not going to run for president again ever in a free and fair election in accordance with the US constitution; that would require changing the constitution in ways that the Republicans don’t have the numbers for, or at least interpreting the existing constitution in a way that is so contorted I don’t think even the most conservative supreme court judges could support it.

So in other words, he does not need anything from the American public anymore. He has no reason to care if part of his base opens their eyes to what he really is (at least, as long as at least 1/12th of the public will vote not to convict on any jury - but he can also self-pardon for anything except impeachment).

I therefore don’t think the kompromat theory holds much water today.

More likely, the Russians calculate that this is an opportunity to sow division in the US - they’d hope for a civil war as the best case. Supporting Trump, as a divisive president, was a start, but they wouldn’t want too many people happy with Trump either, so they want to make the haters hate him even more than is rational, and the sycophants continue to love him more.

Of course, the risk for them is that they make Trump want to support Ukraine to a greater extent than the US currently is, instead of the opposite. They probably calculate he is incompetent and nothing much will change for them either way. Trump is certainly installing yes-men who will be loyal to him but likely not the most competent leaders; this is an effective way to disrupt a government, but it is likely that a declining narcissist who has structured things to remove all dissent will not be at all effective in achieving outcomes that require complex strategy and coordinated execution. So I think they probably consider this risk to be acceptable.

Self-hosted Gitea or Forgejo. It’s pretty easy to host, and if you’ve got a reliable Internet connection and an always on computer, you can host it from home without too much effort.

Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.

They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.

Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.

This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

I think that you are right as to why the publishers picked them specifically to go after in the first place. I don’t think they should have done the “emergency library”.

That said, the publishers arguments show they have an anti-library agenda that goes beyond just the emergency library.

Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

The trouble is that the publishers are not just going after them for infinite lend-outs. The publishers are arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to lend out any digital copies of a book they’ve scanned from a physical copy, even if they lock away the corresponding numbers of physical copies.

Worse, they got a court to agree with them on that, which is where the appeal comes in.

The publishers want it to be that physical copies can only be lent out as physical copies, and for digital copies the libraries have to purchase a subscription for a set number of library patrons and concurrent borrows, specifically for digital lending, and with a finite life. This is all about growing publisher revenue. The publishers are not stopping at saying the number of digital copies lent must be less than or equal to the number of physical copies, and are going after archive.org for their entire digital library programme.