The ability of the internet to collectively archive content that is important to humanity as a whole - in fully distributed and legally questionable ways - is much more impressive IMO.

Clockss seems to be an organization designed to make sure scientific content does not disappear library of Alexandria-style.

The most important task here is being legally safe, which is why they emphasize ivy league credentials, distributed nature, audits and so on. Technically it's not really difficult (except perhaps for dealing with publisher captchas heh).

They are legally safe because of this mechanism:

> Digital content is stored in the CLOCKSS archive with no user access unless a “trigger” event occurs.

All in all I think it's absolutely necessary.