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I didn't think I had anything to say about this. But, for unrelated reasons, I just went looking for a link to the hilarious 24-hour webcomic, Blotchmen. And I

I didn't think I had anything to say about this. But, for unrelated reasons, I just went looking for a link to the hilarious 24-hour webcomic, Blotchmen. And I found lots of pages that link to it, like this MeFi page: http://www.metafilter.com/76009/Blotchmen-and-other-comics-by-Kevin-Cannon http://www.metafilter.com/76009/Blotchmen-and-other-comics-b... and MeFi, just like all of the other top hits on Google, is very careful and very virtuous -- rather than reproduce the comic, they send everyone to the original artist's blog so that Kevin Cannon can get full credit for his work: http://freshmanforlife.com/ http://freshmanforlife.com/ ... but the blog is down. It displays nothing but a wordpress.com error page, and now I'm really depressed because (a) I won't get to read the comic today and (b) I won't get to send it to my friends and (c) I've got visions of it disappearing forever because, hey, that happens, and if poor Kevin Cannon gets hit by a bus his online presence could just disappear, or maybe he'll pull a _why and have a fit of creative destruction and set all of his work on fire one day and then I will be totally screwed, I will never see his work again... ...except, of course, that his work has probably been copied. I guess, if worst comes to worst, I'll have to look for it on some site like FunnyJunk and hope it's there. What is the moral of this story? People copy the work of artists rather than linking because they can make money from sleazy ads, and that is not good. But there is another reason to copy: Links suck. They really really suck. They don't just suck in the long term: They suck in real time. (Blotchmen is only three years old.) Links are unreliable on a technical level (blogs break, poorly cached sites fall over with every slight breeze), on a commercial level (licenses change, DRM becomes obsolete, what was once free is now behind a paywall, what was once purchasable is now off the market and the copyright will last until after I'm dead) and legally nebulous (one DMCA takedown notice can remove a link forever, sometimes even if the notice is fraudulent or invalid). There are a hundred things that can go wrong with a link, and one of them usually does, generally within five years or less.

ben0x539 15y ago
Dude's mostly asking for attribution. So post a copy along with a link to the source and he isn't gonna complain.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  This is true, of course, and quite mature of him. However, he is also wise enough to have noticed the extreme irony: The copies with links to the original source are now gone. This doesn't even seem to be anyone's fault -- the management misinterpreted the artist's complaint and killed all the linked copies in an excess of zeal. Still, whether anyone wanted it to happen or not, the unattributed copies are the surviving copies, because it's not easy for a simple algorithm to find them. When we ask ourselves why so many people are rude enough to post unattributed copies, perhaps we should remember this lesson. It's not necessarily that people don't understand attribution. Maybe they understand it all too well, after years of watching their favorite videos disappear overnight from YouTube. Perhaps the lay public has learned that clear, unambiguous metadata is what you attach to something when you want lawyers to come and take it away.
  - c0riander 15y ago
    Attribution is not linking. Attribution is giving proper credit to the artist who created the work. A link back to a homepage is a courtesy typically given today when someone gives credit. On a site like FJ, when the correct attribution is missing it essentially means that the user submitting it is taking credit for someone else's work, i.e. plagiarism (since the premise is to submit your original work). Also, from the update it looks like the "extreme irony" you mention is actually that the copies that attributed the comic to "The Oatmeal" now attribute it to "The Fag." So they are still there! You can go review back issues all you want, just now the artist doesn't even get credit for those.
  - Volpe 15y ago
    > the unattributed copies are the surviving copies, because > it's not easy for a simple algorithm to find them. Pie in the sky idea: Someone like google, who indexes everything, would conceivably be able to work out 'original' content vs 'copies', and do something: Offer original link in search results, or notify author of copies, etc.
  - eropple 15y ago
    Management didn't "misinterpret" anything. Management changed all items that said "The Oatmeal" to "the fag". Your comments assume a lack of malice where malice is clearly evident. ;)
tomkarlo 15y ago
"Links suck." I hope the irony of posting this on a web site that mostly links to other sites is not lost on anyone. All forms of communication entail compromises - who has control, how persistent they are, how easy they are to access. If you own a book, you know it won't disappear - but you also have to move it around with you, and it's never going to get updated unless you buy a new one. The alternative to linking is to have a hugely denormalized web where owners don't control their own content, have no way to update it and little incentive to publish it. (I believe we called those "CD ROMs" back in the day.) Yes, some web sites disappear if there is so little interest in their content that it's not worth maintaining them. But it's still better than books, where if interest was limited, it probably never got published in the first place.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  The irony is certainly not lost on me. I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium. Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not going to be 1990 again no matter how much anyone might wish it. The actual modern alternative to links is: Copying everything. Just cache it all. Every time you follow a link, you copy whatever you read or view at the other end and store it forever. Keeping the link as well is fine -- it's very useful metadata -- but what you really want is the content, and you'll keep that forever. Lend it to your friends by bumping iPhones with them, or something. This is astonishingly practical: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_... I already own the storage devices that would hold every written word I have ever read or will ever read in my life. [1] Within another decade or two I'll be able to buy a storage device that would hold a video stream of everything I'll ever see. And once we all start archiving everything in our pockets we will almost certainly end up with a "hugely denormalized" system. I like that. We call that "individuality". I don't really want to live in a hive mind. I like my mind, and I don't always like other people's minds. It's an advantage to have a mind of your own. How else would I be able to conduct whimsical flights of fancy like this one? --- [1] Let's see: Claimed world record for speed reading: Anne Jones with 4,700 words per minute with 67% comprehension. average length of an English word: about 5 letters. Five bytes. 24 hours of reading at 4700 wpm: 1.9 GB, uncompressed; one year of reading, no sleep: 691 GB; one hundred years of reading 12 hours per day at maximum speed: 34TB; compression ratio of roughly 7 to 1 (see http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php): 4.9TB. I've got that sitting on the desk in front of me.
jtheory 15y ago
I'm not sure where it falls into the whole debate, but there's always the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It doesn't have everything, but it does have this: http://web.archive.org/web/20090502231940/http://www.freshmanforlife.com/2008/10/blotchmen-part-12.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090502231940/http://www.freshma... http://web.archive.org/web/20090430053741/http://www.freshmanforlife.com/2008/10/blotchmen-part-22.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090430053741/http://www.freshma... True, links suck, but there are more options than just "search crappy joke sites for ripped-off illegal copies".
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Thanks for taking the trouble to look that up! Archive.org is indeed awesome. And I think I can make archive.org fit into the pocket universe of my rant quite easily: Archive.org doesn't suck because it makes copies. It copies everything, along with the links. It's the content that makes it great. The links are just metadata, which is fine as far as it goes, so long as it continues to lead to the actual data which is what I want. There are organizations who simply publish their stuff directly to archive.org. This is perhaps unstylish but it strikes me as eminently sensible. It's going to end up there anyway, or it's probably going to be lost to history, so why not cut out the middleman?

ben0x539 15y ago

Dude's mostly asking for attribution. So post a copy along with a link to the source and he isn't gonna complain.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
This is true, of course, and quite mature of him. However, he is also wise enough to have noticed the extreme irony: The copies with links to the original source are now gone. This doesn't even seem to be anyone's fault -- the management misinterpreted the artist's complaint and killed all the linked copies in an excess of zeal. Still, whether anyone wanted it to happen or not, the unattributed copies are the surviving copies, because it's not easy for a simple algorithm to find them. When we ask ourselves why so many people are rude enough to post unattributed copies, perhaps we should remember this lesson. It's not necessarily that people don't understand attribution. Maybe they understand it all too well, after years of watching their favorite videos disappear overnight from YouTube. Perhaps the lay public has learned that clear, unambiguous metadata is what you attach to something when you want lawyers to come and take it away.
- c0riander 15y ago
  Attribution is not linking. Attribution is giving proper credit to the artist who created the work. A link back to a homepage is a courtesy typically given today when someone gives credit. On a site like FJ, when the correct attribution is missing it essentially means that the user submitting it is taking credit for someone else's work, i.e. plagiarism (since the premise is to submit your original work). Also, from the update it looks like the "extreme irony" you mention is actually that the copies that attributed the comic to "The Oatmeal" now attribute it to "The Fag." So they are still there! You can go review back issues all you want, just now the artist doesn't even get credit for those.
- Volpe 15y ago
  > the unattributed copies are the surviving copies, because > it's not easy for a simple algorithm to find them. Pie in the sky idea: Someone like google, who indexes everything, would conceivably be able to work out 'original' content vs 'copies', and do something: Offer original link in search results, or notify author of copies, etc.
- eropple 15y ago
  Management didn't "misinterpret" anything. Management changed all items that said "The Oatmeal" to "the fag". Your comments assume a lack of malice where malice is clearly evident. ;)

tomkarlo 15y ago

"Links suck." I hope the irony of posting this on a web site that mostly links to other sites is not lost on anyone. All forms of communication entail compromises - who has control, how persistent they are, how easy they are to access. If you own a book, you know it won't disappear - but you also have to move it around with you, and it's never going to get updated unless you buy a new one. The alternative to linking is to have a hugely denormalized web where owners don't control their own content, have no way to update it and little incentive to publish it. (I believe we called those "CD ROMs" back in the day.) Yes, some web sites disappear if there is so little interest in their content that it's not worth maintaining them. But it's still better than books, where if interest was limited, it probably never got published in the first place.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
The irony is certainly not lost on me. I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium. Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not going to be 1990 again no matter how much anyone might wish it. The actual modern alternative to links is: Copying everything. Just cache it all. Every time you follow a link, you copy whatever you read or view at the other end and store it forever. Keeping the link as well is fine -- it's very useful metadata -- but what you really want is the content, and you'll keep that forever. Lend it to your friends by bumping iPhones with them, or something. This is astonishingly practical: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_... I already own the storage devices that would hold every written word I have ever read or will ever read in my life. [1] Within another decade or two I'll be able to buy a storage device that would hold a video stream of everything I'll ever see. And once we all start archiving everything in our pockets we will almost certainly end up with a "hugely denormalized" system. I like that. We call that "individuality". I don't really want to live in a hive mind. I like my mind, and I don't always like other people's minds. It's an advantage to have a mind of your own. How else would I be able to conduct whimsical flights of fancy like this one? --- [1] Let's see: Claimed world record for speed reading: Anne Jones with 4,700 words per minute with 67% comprehension. average length of an English word: about 5 letters. Five bytes. 24 hours of reading at 4700 wpm: 1.9 GB, uncompressed; one year of reading, no sleep: 691 GB; one hundred years of reading 12 hours per day at maximum speed: 34TB; compression ratio of roughly 7 to 1 (see http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php): 4.9TB. I've got that sitting on the desk in front of me.

jtheory 15y ago

I'm not sure where it falls into the whole debate, but there's always the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It doesn't have everything, but it does have this: http://web.archive.org/web/20090502231940/http://www.freshmanforlife.com/2008/10/blotchmen-part-12.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090502231940/http://www.freshma... http://web.archive.org/web/20090430053741/http://www.freshmanforlife.com/2008/10/blotchmen-part-22.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090430053741/http://www.freshma... True, links suck, but there are more options than just "search crappy joke sites for ripped-off illegal copies".

mechanical_fish 15y ago
Thanks for taking the trouble to look that up! Archive.org is indeed awesome. And I think I can make archive.org fit into the pocket universe of my rant quite easily: Archive.org doesn't suck because it makes copies. It copies everything, along with the links. It's the content that makes it great. The links are just metadata, which is fine as far as it goes, so long as it continues to lead to the actual data which is what I want. There are organizations who simply publish their stuff directly to archive.org. This is perhaps unstylish but it strikes me as eminently sensible. It's going to end up there anyway, or it's probably going to be lost to history, so why not cut out the middleman?