159 points

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.

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60 points

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.

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31 points

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…

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4 points

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

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11 points

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).

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7 points

Well put.

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That being said, if a third party, like the Internet Archive, wants to archive it they should have every right.

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15 points

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.

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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.

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5 points

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.

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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.

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-3 points
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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.

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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.

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3 points
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Information doesn’t have “owners.” It only has – at most – “copyright holders,” who are being allowed to temporarily borrow control of it from the Public Domain.

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-3 points
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This is just like AI scraping

Edit if you allow a third party to “archive” your content, the ship has sailed. I’m not advocating for or against anything but once your stuff is scraped (by anyone) it’s gone.

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3 points

Yes except AI companies are making mad cheddar.

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Not really. If the archive decides to publish your work, that’s copyright infringement. If an AI company decides to scrape your content and develop an AI with your content, I would argue that that’s a derivative work, which is also protected by copyright.

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13 points
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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.

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-6 points
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Heritage laws exist in a good number of countries so that all the cultural architecture doesn’t get erased

Copyright law itself is supposed to be such a law (at least in the US), by the way.

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

(emphasis added)

Deleting copyrighted works is THEFT from the Public Domain!

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9 points

No, it is not. Copyright law ensures the original creator gets paid for their work and nobody can imitate it (quite literally “the right to copy”) without permission. Copyright law is about making money.

Heritage law is about preserving history.

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9 points

We as a society gives your protections through copyright, why can we not let that protection come with some requirements?

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8 points

Individuals should be allowed. Corporations shouldn’t.

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4 points

Yup that’s why internet archive is a thing, a site should not be forced to host their content forever but the hivemind in lemmy has a hard on against any and all corporate entities and they’ll justify any kind of over reach as long as it’s against one

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1 point

I mostly agree, but I do think that if the website was partly funded by subscriptions or the users paid via advertising/their data then there’s a gap for saying it should remain available.

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-6 points

As the owner, it’s up to me if I want it up or not.

You can archive it without keeping it “up”.

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4 points

Cool cool, so who will be paying for the time to archive it, the medium the archive it to, and the accessibility should someone else want to access it? I mean I can put a copy on a floppy disk and keep it in my desk and say it’s archived.

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0 points

I wasn’t disagreeing with you. Just pointing out that that costs are a tiny fraction to archive it offline rather than keeping a website up and operational.

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45 points

It’s a complicated matter if we consider things such as the GDPR’s “Right to be forgotten”.

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38 points

Corporations shouldn’t have those kinds of rights.

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38 points

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.

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23 points

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.

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26 points

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.

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17 points
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, 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.

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12 points

Yeah, right? I mean, imagine if YouTube when down and just deleted all the videos. People would be up and arms demanding legislative action. There would be endless lawsuits.

As a creative, you rely on platforms to not obliterate your stuff. At least not immediately. This guy has a horse in the race of this site.

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3 points

Why wouldn’t you save a copy if it’s so important to you?

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24 points
*

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?

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22 points

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.

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7 points

This is a strawman towards the actual issue which is the loss of information.

The least they could do is just provide a copy of their material to internet archive or some torrent site.

I think similarly about digital services stopping or hardware no longer getting support. Thats a fine and reasonable economy wise but at least have the moral decency to open source it instead.

The customer always gets screwed and the company somehow gets to keep the money. This case is slightly different, i don’t know if you had to pay for access but my sentiment of future use holds.

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1 point

If someone had to pay for it, then sure, laws should address the issue. If there’s been some access time paid for remaining.

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2 points

Look into maidsafe.

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2 points

According to the site you have to buy tokens to use the network. Despite stating that the maidsafe network is decentralized, nobody controls it, etc., etc., having to buy tokens seems to be a barrier to entry.

I don’t know, I guess I have a hard time with a network that reserves access via a coin that fluctuates on a market price. Seems like they’re playing a “it’s like bitcoin, but not, but kinda is” type of game.

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1 point

My understanding of its system is the following:

Hosting data costs money, so in order to have a decentralised hosting system there need to be an incentive for people to contribute hardware. Developing apps/websites costs money.

In the current internet, the incentive is that you can make money by harvesting people’s data (selling them to advertisers) and displaying ads to users.

What maidsafe proposes is that users use some of their hardware to host data, get paid in a dedicated currency that they then use to access website/apps which remunerate app developper. In this manner everyone has an incentive: users have an incentive to host data to not pay anything, developpers have an incentive to make apps in order to get paid, company and stakeholders have an incentive to invest into the system in order to have a presence/visibility.

I know nobody wants to pay to access the internet, but the truth is we already are paying for it, we just don’t realise it. If we want an ad-free internet there needs to be some other way users are paying for content, I think contributing CPU and HDD is a nice solution because it wouldn’t feel like paying.

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1 point

The site is atrocious. I’ll look at it another time and try to get what it’s really about. But it seems really ADHD-hostile.

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1 point

I’ve made another comment underneath my original one explaining my understanding of it.

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