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 g

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.