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What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowl

What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowly made it onto BitTorrent and other sites, and are still available today. Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available. I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.

yardie 8y ago
I still have a 56kbps MP3 copy of Eminem’s first EP sent to me, pre-Napster, over AIM. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t unavailable until this post. And my son loves Eminem.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  It looks like some copies hit the open internet around 2009, and a few of the songs has been remastered as promotional gimmicks. But yeah, I remember looking a bunch of years ago and finding that the title and one other song (Open Mic, maybe?) were the only things in circulation. It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
This is the negative of private invite-only trackers like what.cd. If they end up closing a lot of data gets dies with them. In contrast to that piratebay and nyaa.pantsu regularly upload their databases and there are even offline database readers for them.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  This is very true, yeah. Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable. Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.

yardie 8y ago

I still have a 56kbps MP3 copy of Eminem’s first EP sent to me, pre-Napster, over AIM. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t unavailable until this post. And my son loves Eminem.

Bartweiss 8y ago
It looks like some copies hit the open internet around 2009, and a few of the songs has been remastered as promotional gimmicks. But yeah, I remember looking a bunch of years ago and finding that the title and one other song (Open Mic, maybe?) were the only things in circulation. It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago

This is the negative of private invite-only trackers like what.cd. If they end up closing a lot of data gets dies with them. In contrast to that piratebay and nyaa.pantsu regularly upload their databases and there are even offline database readers for them.

Bartweiss 8y ago
This is very true, yeah. Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable. Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.