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.
That being said, if a third party, like the Internet Archive, wants to archive it they should have every right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Totally get what you’re saying, but I’m highlighting the mechanical step of a third party having “every right” to scrape or persist your content is in complete contrast to the other points in this thread about rights to be forgotten and so on.
Right to be forgotten is specifically for personally identifiable information. And I’m pretty sure it’s sound on copyright grounds as long as you don’t distribute. And honestly, I don’t really see a problem with it.
And if you’ve made a personal website, say, with a blog of your valuable ideas/art (valuable to you, or anyone, arbitrarily), the ability to erase your site represents forgetting. The whole site may contain your PII throughout.
Any scraping or archiving techniques degrade that 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.
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.
It’s the same licensing agreement. I phrased what I said to specifically adhere to what they say in their own terms of use in accordance with FCC regulation.
https://disneytermsofuse.com/english/
If you were to, say in 1990, get caught broadcasting your copy of a Disney movie without the legal ability to do so, they could absolutely use the court system to revoke your right to the licensed copy of that media and have it confiscated.
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?
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.
Irrelevant. It’s still my content that I have sole rights to. If I want to share it to individuals I can do that if I please. You don’t have any rights to do anything else with it.
Incorrect. Your browser made it do that. How that data is accessed and displayed is not controlled by me. Case and point you can have extensions on your browser that changes how my websites are rendered.
That doesn’t give you a right to replicate my content elsewhere.
Because it’s not yours? And publishing it again elsewhere is effectively you claiming it is yours. Especially if published without attribution.
You guys can’t have this both ways. If an artist makes a painting… and posts a picture of it. They have no rights to the painting anymore? They deserve no ownership/pay for what they’ve done? If a news story is published… They have no rights to sell that story to another publisher just because you can copy and paste the text? This is absurd logic. My website has/had a cost. I bore it. I have sole rights to that content.
No, this has to do with rights of the content. Owning the CD grants you a license to the content on that CD. That’s about as good as ownership gets there. They own the CD/license. As long as that CD exists/works. You don’t gain that same right by simply visiting a website.
No it doesn’t. Taking content and using in an unauthorized way while gaining money or some other consideration is also theft. Wayback Machine and other archives are paid for somehow. If some content being on a site swayed someone to make a donation to that archive site, then that value should have gone to the original creator. That is theft. This is the core of most of the current lawsuits. Although they often equate this to “potential and future earnings” which is bullshit because oftentimes that content would never be have been viewed at whatever cost they ascribed.
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.
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.
I’d better never see you bitching about AI scraping your content. I’ll remind you of this very comment.
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.
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.
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.
You are moving the goalpost. again. The talk was about the Internet Archive providing a copy of my website to the public. Not you storing it somewhere on your drive for personal use. Although that’s also a rather tricky legal matter.
But nice for you to agree with the rest. Yes, you could at one point publish a copy. 70 Years after my death. and not a second before that. and only if its not specific protected because i contains personal information. i think the protection is not limited in that case.
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.
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.
You can archive it without keeping it “up”.
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.
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.