Last week it was reported that GameStop, a clown show of a company peddling meme stocks and cheap video game merchandise, had unceremoniously and without notice shut down Game Informer, a magazine and website that had been publishing in some form since 1991. The decision was a terrible one for many reasons. For readers and […]
Huh, the difference is that a website is not akin to a public park but privately owned park with or without entrance fee. The owner is nice enough to open the park and let you do whatever you want for free with the cleaning and maintenance is paid by the owner, but when the park is closed, would you still say the owner should still be forced to maintain it?
I don’t particularly agree with the concept of the privately owned park and feel that it has ruined the social lives of Americans, since they’re no longer allowed to “loiter” (exist) anywhere outside of work and home. And also, yes, I think you should have to maintain the property you’ve taken away from the surrounding community or else give it back. I don’t think the comparison to the Web necessarily holds up, but I do think that people’s contributions to a website remain theirs even if you pay a lawyer to write down that it’s not. The concept of complete forfeiture of any claim to your work because-I-said-so is very made up. Your hard work is not.
Hmmm, yeah it gets harder to associate it with physical reality when user generated content is introduced. Maybe an archival of said content is mandated but then again, who is going to serve the archive. In the case of youtube, it would be almost impossible
I was just talking about YouTube last night! It’s easy to forget the mind bending amount of data uploaded and stored every single day. It is impossible to draw a comparison to anything that has ever come before. And it will all have to go away at some point, as far as I’m concerned. It’s untenable to keep more than a tiny fraction of it. There is so much interesting stuff… and the site has existed for the blink of an eye. Nobody can consume a meaningful amount of the information stored on it, nobody could possibly categorize and manage a system of valuation and sortation. Barring a radical reorganization of economic system and values, any sort of proposed YouTube Archival Project never makes a dent. And files are only getting bigger… crazy to think that my kids will likely never get through the amount of photos and videos of my childhood that exist, yet I currently possess all of the photographic proof of my mom’s parents’ existence in the back of a small drawer.