Last week it was reported that GameStop, a clown show of a company peddling meme stocks and cheap video game merchandise, had unceremoniously and without notice shut down Game Informer, a magazine and website that had been publishing in some form since 1991. The decision was a terrible one for many reasons. For readers and […]
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.
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.
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).
Well put.
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.
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:
(emphasis added)
Deleting copyrighted works is THEFT from the Public Domain!
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.
Copyright law is precisely a means to an end of encouraging more works to be created (and thus eventually enter the public domain) and absolutely nothing else. In particular, compensation to the creator is nothing but a proverbial “carrot,” not any sort of moral right or entitlement.
It’s also a power of Congress, by the way, which means it’s optional. Congress may enact copyright law if it so chooses, but is not obligated by the constitution to do so. This is in stark contrast to e.g. the Bill of Rights, which is written the opposite way: presuming such rights exist and prohibiting the government from infringing upon them. In other words, if the framers meant for copyright to be an actual “right,” they clearly would’ve plainly said so!
I think you don’t understand the difference between fundamental rights and regular old rights. A right does not have to be fundamental to be a right.
And, if copyright law were about encouraging creation, it would not restrict the use of other peoples’ work.
Would you do me a favour? Read back over this thread until you realise you just argued creation is “encouraged” by a category of law which only restricts the use of other peoples’ work, including modifying it to create derivative works, and has been used as a club against creation to boot. Consider, how does Nintendo kill Smash tourneys? How many YouTube videos have been wrongly DMCA’d?
We as a society gives your protections through copyright, why can we not let that protection come with some requirements?
Individuals should be allowed. Corporations shouldn’t.
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
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.