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It is his. This is what happens in an ethereal format like the internet, and it's something we'll have to adapt to -- in the history of mass publication, one wa

It is his. This is what happens in an ethereal format like the internet, and it's something we'll have to adapt to -- in the history of mass publication, one wasn't able to just destroy all copies of a thing with the push of a button. Books and pamphlets could be hunted down, but almost always some would survive, because you can't remotely change the contents of the paper. In the digital age, you can. If there's a lesson to take from this, it's the dangers of the non-permanence of the web; we should be looking at solutions that can mitigate that danger. But I don't blame Everett at all for not just giving away his company's IP for $15k in bandwidth bills, and I don't believe he should be shamed into doing so. If I were him, I'd probably be contacting Sotheby's or another auctioneer that specializes in high-value goods and seeing about selling off the dataset to the highest bidder. Then these fellows can put their money where their mouth is and show us just how important the preservation of that data is.

eropple 12y ago
This celebration of plutocracy gone wild is one of the more disgusting things I've read on Hacker News, and that's saying a lot. His corporation only exists through our societal forebearance. He has an obligation to the society that gave him the legal structure and protections thereof. Part of that is not deleting history just because he's in a snit.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  a. He's not necessarily deleting it. b. If it's worth so much, people should be willing to pay a fair price for it. The implication that he should let it all go for a payment to Amazon is, frankly, insulting, and I'm sure you'd be singing a different tune if it was your own startup that you were trying to liquidate. c. Talk is cheap. It's easy to try to shame someone into letting you take their intellectual property. It's not plutocracy, it's just business. d. Getting a lot of users doesn't require your company to convert into a charity. I am 100% sure that Noah Everett has a price, and I'm sure if people actually valued the Twitpic corpus he'd be able to get it. e. All uses of Twitpic were voluntary and done with the implicit acknowledgement that the images and comments may go away one day. If someone was not OK with this, they should've saved their data, and many probably did. Blocking the Internet Archive from devaluing the dataset is not bad, wrong, or ethically icky in any way. The larger ethical crime lies at the feet of the people trying to convince Everett that he doesn't deserve fair compensation for curating this historically significant dataset. f. If no one is willing to pay the money to preserve the dataset, it's obviously not as culturally significant as you believe it is. There's plenty of money out there.

eropple 12y ago

This celebration of plutocracy gone wild is one of the more disgusting things I've read on Hacker News, and that's saying a lot. His corporation only exists through our societal forebearance. He has an obligation to the society that gave him the legal structure and protections thereof. Part of that is not deleting history just because he's in a snit.

cookiecaper 12y ago
a. He's not necessarily deleting it. b. If it's worth so much, people should be willing to pay a fair price for it. The implication that he should let it all go for a payment to Amazon is, frankly, insulting, and I'm sure you'd be singing a different tune if it was your own startup that you were trying to liquidate. c. Talk is cheap. It's easy to try to shame someone into letting you take their intellectual property. It's not plutocracy, it's just business. d. Getting a lot of users doesn't require your company to convert into a charity. I am 100% sure that Noah Everett has a price, and I'm sure if people actually valued the Twitpic corpus he'd be able to get it. e. All uses of Twitpic were voluntary and done with the implicit acknowledgement that the images and comments may go away one day. If someone was not OK with this, they should've saved their data, and many probably did. Blocking the Internet Archive from devaluing the dataset is not bad, wrong, or ethically icky in any way. The larger ethical crime lies at the feet of the people trying to convince Everett that he doesn't deserve fair compensation for curating this historically significant dataset. f. If no one is willing to pay the money to preserve the dataset, it's obviously not as culturally significant as you believe it is. There's plenty of money out there.