This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
That being said, if a third party, like the Internet Archive, wants to archive it they should have every right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, I agree with the other commenter and, as much as I dislike AI as it currently is, I have never and probably never will bitch about the scraping. If I put things out there online, I am aware that they may be used in ways that I never intended. That's how it has always been, after all.
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.
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 can keep it until the copyright expires and then I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.
general copyright is 70 years. So no. You couldn't do whatever you wanted with it as the computer you're using would be long dead... and possibly you'd even be long dead. Replicating the content to another device without owners consent could and likely would be a violation of that same copyright.
Replicating a personal backup to another device is covered by free use. Only distribution and derivative works are covered by copyright.
And yes, the length of copyright is way too long. It recon it should be the same as patents, 20 years. Or let it be as long as the warranty and let the big companies duke it out with each other.
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
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.
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.
Well the whole premise of their argument is flawed because they're basing it on the fact of redistribution. If I'm not redistributing it, then the whole argument of that falls away entirely. Under fair use, I believe you're also allowed to make copies of things for research purposes, so I'd argue that's what an archive is.
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.
Imagine that absolute historical clusterfuck if terrible politicians and bad actors could just delete entire portions of their history.
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.
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.
This is just like AI scraping
Yes except AI companies are making mad cheddar.
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.
I'm not discussing what they do with it, I'm discussing the raw act of ingesting your page.
Cats and bags
To venture into opinion, I think there shouldn't be "every right" to archive your page, for any purposes such as archive or ai or whatever.
Edit but I acknowledge how the open internet works and the futility of trying to control that
It seems like a very dangerous, very slippery slope. The first people to abuse this would be the big corporations who want to hide and cover up as much as they possibly can. I think the copyright law framework is a useful lens to view this with which I outlined in my response above.
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, I'd be okay with some kind of heritage system for preserving the internet.
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)
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.
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 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.
Well put.
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...
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).
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?
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?
Stopped reading after the first paragraph.
Yep.
"a clown show of a company"
Wow, I'm sure this will be a good and unbiased article! /s
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
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.
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.
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.
So this guy's argument is that companies with commercial websites should be forced by the government to keep their websites online for some predetermined amount of time after announcing that they will be shutting down, so that other people can pilfer the content, on the grounds that shutting down a website includes relinquishing all property rights to the content hosted there?
I'm gonna go ahead and guess that this guy isn't a lawyer.
Also, and maybe this is a stretch, but this article expresses a suspicious amount of concern for integrity in games journalism...
It's not gamergater fighting for preservation, you just enjoy being a bootlicker.
