What? No. What utter nonsense.
I should be able to remove a website that I created and paid for without there being some silly law that I have to archive it.
As the owner, it’s up to me if I want it up or not. After all, I’m paying for the bloody thing.
Ehh, I halfway agree, but there is value in keeping historical stuff around. Heritage laws exist in a good number of countries so that all the cultural architecture doesn’t get erased by developers looking to turn a quick buck or rich people who think that 500 year old castle could really use an infinity pool hot tub; there are strict requirements for a building to be heritage-listed but once they are, the owner is required by law to maintain it to historical standards.
I only halfway disagree because you’re right, forcing people to pay for something has never sat right with me generally. As long as the laws don’t bite people like you and me, e.g. there are relatively high requirements for something to be considered “culturally relevant” enough to preserve, I’d be okay with some kind of heritage system for preserving the internet.
The vast majority of regular internet users never think of things from this perspective because they’ve never been in a position of running a public facing website. To most people, the Internet is just there to be taken for granted like the public street and park outside someone’s house. All the stuff on it just exists there by itself. That’s also why we have issues with free speech online, where people expect certain rights that don’t exist, because these aren’t publicly owned websites and people aren’t getting that.
To most people, the Internet is just there to be taken for granted like the public street and park outside someone’s house.
Both of which require maintenance that most people don’t think about…
And both of which impact its users’ lives, thus why the users feel they should have a say in what’s done with the space, even if they aren’t the owners of the space
Huh, the difference is that a website is not akin to a public park but privately owned park with or without entrance fee. The owner is nice enough to open the park and let you do whatever you want for free with the cleaning and maintenance is paid by the owner, but when the park is closed, would you still say the owner should still be forced to maintain it?
I don’t particularly agree with the concept of the privately owned park and feel that it has ruined the social lives of Americans, since they’re no longer allowed to “loiter” (exist) anywhere outside of work and home. And also, yes, I think you should have to maintain the property you’ve taken away from the surrounding community or else give it back. I don’t think the comparison to the Web necessarily holds up, but I do think that people’s contributions to a website remain theirs even if you pay a lawyer to write down that it’s not. The concept of complete forfeiture of any claim to your work because-I-said-so is very made up. Your hard work is not.
Hmmm, yeah it gets harder to associate it with physical reality when user generated content is introduced. Maybe an archival of said content is mandated but then again, who is going to serve the archive. In the case of youtube, it would be almost impossible
I was just talking about YouTube last night! It’s easy to forget the mind bending amount of data uploaded and stored every single day. It is impossible to draw a comparison to anything that has ever come before. And it will all have to go away at some point, as far as I’m concerned. It’s untenable to keep more than a tiny fraction of it. There is so much interesting stuff… and the site has existed for the blink of an eye. Nobody can consume a meaningful amount of the information stored on it, nobody could possibly categorize and manage a system of valuation and sortation. Barring a radical reorganization of economic system and values, any sort of proposed YouTube Archival Project never makes a dent. And files are only getting bigger… crazy to think that my kids will likely never get through the amount of photos and videos of my childhood that exist, yet I currently possess all of the photographic proof of my mom’s parents’ existence in the back of a small drawer.
Maybe the internet should be treated more like public infrastructure. If everyone communicates primarily online, the lack of freedom of speech on online platforms is a problem. And the sudden disappearance of a service people depend on, too (not that I think this website is a good example).
Individuals should be allowed. Corporations shouldn’t.
We as a society gives your protections through copyright, why can we not let that protection come with some requirements?
That being said, if a third party, like the Internet Archive, wants to archive it they should have every right.
A “Library of Congress” for published web content maybe. Some sort of standard that allows / requires websites that publish content on oublic-facing sites to also share a permanent copy with an archive, without having the archive have to scrape it.
Sort of like how book publishers send a copy to the LoC.
I don’t think requiring is a great idea, but definitely making the standard that you can do if you want would be very cool.
Maybe for sites from corporations or similar sources. But people should have always have the right to be forgotten. And in fact in some countries they do have this right.
Want to be forgotten is about personally identifiable information. Other work, which is covered under copyright, which means if someone has legally obtained a copy of it, as long as they’re not distributing it, is their right to do whatever the fuck they want with it. Even hold it until the copyright expires at which point they can publish it as much as they want.
I’m not sure if i can agree with that. A third party cannot simply override the rights of the owner. If i want my website gone, i want it gone from everywhere. no exception.
That kinda also goes in the whole “Right to be forgotten” direction. I have absolute sovereignty over my data. This includes websites created by me.
Yes they can, otherwise Disney can decide that that DVD you bought 10 years ago, you’re no longer allowed to have and you must destroy it.
Right to be forgotten is bullshit, not from an ideological standpoint right, but purely from a practicality stand point the old rule of once its on the internet its on the internet forever stands true. That’s not even getting started on the fact that right to be forgotten is about your personal information, not any material you may publish that is outside of that.
You compare entirely different things here. I’m talking about a website i own not a product i sell. And no, this “on the internet forever” is complete and utter nonsense that was never true to begin with. the amount of stuff lost to time easely dwarfs the one still around.
You chose to distribute said website to everyone on the internet. I chose to exercise my rights of fair use to make a local convenience copy of said website. I can then theoretically hold, said local convenience copy, for as long as I want, until your copyright expires, at which point I can publish it.
It’s a bold assumption that that data is not just sitting on someone’s hard drive somewhere.
No. When you purchase the dvd you become the owner of that specific disc… you never gained ownership of my website just because you visited and copied my content.
Yes, and when I archived your website, I became the owner of that specific copy of your website.
No, I never granted you any ownership of my content. Period. You didn’t pay me, you didn’t engage in any contract with me.
Simply archiving my stuff and running away then publishing it as your own is theft.
You’ve put it out there for free, though, and the data literally ends up on my machine because you made it do that, so what’s the problem with me saving the data on my machine for later, and potentially sharing it elsewhere for free again?
then publishing it as your own is theft
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This scenario (misattribution of content) has nothing to do with the previous discussion. The other commenter is making an analogy to CDs, owning a CD and lending it to others doesn’t mean you’re claiming its content is your own creation.
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Theft implies deprivation of ownership. Calling this theft is like calling piracy theft. It may be illegal by this or that metric, but it’s not normal theft.
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Copyright only protects distribution and derivative works. I can keep a copy of it on my local machine for as long as I want. Theoretically I can keep it until the copyright expires and then I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.
I’d better never see you bitching about AI scraping your content. I’ll remind you of this very comment.
I would argue that AI is a derivative work and that is protected by copyright. Archiving a copy of something and keeping it for personal use is not derivative work and not distribution and that’s not protected by copyright.
Disney can decide to terminate that license but the disc is another story. The license is for the media on the disc but the physical disc itself is owned by the person who bought it. This is literally why a company can remove a show or movie or song from your digital library. The license holder can always revoke the license. It was harder to enforce with physical media (and cost prohibitive in a lot of cases), but still possible.
No, they can’t Google first sale doctrine.
They can remove shit from your digital library because in page 76 of the terms and conditions that you didn’t read, they redefined the word purchase to mean temporarily rent.
Or maybe writers should just archive their own work. So they can make it available on the Internet Archive when their work becomes inaccessible.
Why is everyone so mad about this? I mean, it’s a salty article, but yeah, it kinda sucks when publications don’t give notice before closing down. I think providing the public, including previous contributors, time to archive content is a good practice.
It’s a good practice, sure. But as per the headline, the author wants to make it a law. That’s why people are not having it.
That’s not really what the article is about. The author even concedes that such a law would never, and perhaps never should, happen; rather, he feels that corporations will not adopt best practices of preservation unless compelled, and it pisses him off.
The title is deliberate hyperbolic. He’s clearly pissed.
, it’s a salty article
Actually the author himself is somewhat harmed by this situation. I would be salty too. When I wish to write my CV, I can say: my text have been published at X and Y. Especially nice if it’s an important and well known publication. Now a part of his CV is literally erased, he can’t access his own texts anymore (not even on Internet Archive). That’s… utterly ridiculous. It’s a common practice to send the author a copy (or multiple) of the text he has published, he has every right to own a copy of them. Now the copy that was intended to be available to everyone is not available even to him. Something of the sort really has happened to me too when a website I published an article on a site underwent a redesign and now the text just isn’t available anymore. Admittedly it’s still on IA, but it’s an awkward situation.
It’s a complicated matter if we consider things such as the GDPR’s “Right to be forgotten”.
Corporations shouldn’t have those kinds of rights.
What is it with people who think everything they don’t like should be illegal? Have you never read a history book? Authoritarianism is bad mmkay
We can’t get companies to clean up toxic waste sites that they create yet people think they can get companies to backup a website?
Stopped reading after the first paragraph.
Why?
Maybe the Web should look more like Freenet or like BitTorrent.
But using a technology working the known way and trying to force conveniences by law seems sisyphean and harmful in many aspects.
If someone wants to keep old versions, let them. But forcing companies to host something is I dunno.
Good Lord what a dumb idea.
Edit: I like an idiot couldn’t help myself and actually read some of this.
Is this an 11 year old?