On Thursday, What.CD was raided by French police. It was a veritable “Library of Alexandria” for the world’s music, painstakingly curated by a worldwide group of passionate enthusiasts. And now it is gone forever, metaphorically burned to the ground. We live in a worldwide culture that sanctions mass destruction of information and knowledge. What a tragedy.
Technology is improving so quickly every year, and yet we cannot take the continued existence of anything for granted. For that reason, and many others, I renewed my donation to Wikipedia today. It is too late for What.CD, but at least we can contribute to other critical reservoirs of knowledge. I invite you to do the same, and in the words of Jimmy Wales: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”