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Why does everyone compare this kind of situation to a library being burned down? Look, not everyone can go into a library, leave their stuff around and expect i
by CodeMage 15y ago
Why does everyone compare this kind of situation to a library being burned down? Look, not everyone can go into a library, leave their stuff around and expect it to be available to everyone else all the time, for free.
Not everything in the world is worth preserving. To be precise, it's not equally worth to everyone. If you publish something that is of great worth to you, it doesn't automatically make it valuable to everyone else.
What's reprehensible in this story is the attempt by Poetry.com to fight the Archive Team. The rest of the stuff seems completely reasonable. Bear in mind that the company notified its users. If you published something somewhere for free and couldn't be bothered to keep your contact information correct, why would you complain about losing the stuff you published?
- jka 15y agoBroadly agree, although I would say it's hard to decide which artifacts will have future value - many of the fascinating things about ancient Roman culture come not from the great works of art, but from the basic bowls and tools which people used to prepare food or for other daily rituals. In the same way, future historians (or perhaps data archaeologists, to frame it another way) might find a lot of value in the things we might consider mundane or don't feel 'compelled' to digitally preserve.