So people get away with torrenting TV shows and movies all day long, but saving a formerly free webpage will get them sued out of existence? Yes, that does seem silly in 2016.
And no one’s got an outlaw version of Wayback, hosted in Somalia or Russia or somewhere?
Not if you posted it on Facebook. They don’t actually delete things from their harddrives when you delete them, they just flag them invisible. You also give them the rights to use anything you post in advertising. AFAIK its unlikely but you could see a deleted photo you posted served back to yourself as an ad.
I’ve just been on the Internet Archive, which I rarely do because with the new Beta style it’s pretty well unusable; but the Wayback Machine still works as well or not as before.
Now, it was never true the Internet preserves all, because websites drop massively each year, and they can be tampered with subsequently by the owners as when a news site surreptitiously changes a paragraph, and others become unpleasant with indistinguishable Metro Style makeovers.
However, so long as the Wayback lasts — and I shouldn’t think that’s forever; some regimes block it in their countries, and for all we know a future government may obtain it’s destruction: something the communists such as the soviets and the Cambodians were certainly capable of — there is a record.
Like all futile confessions of annoyance, being merely weakness, querulous objection to the stone fact that everything put up on the Internet is fair game and can be taken is merely petulance. Personally, I would not if you asked nicely — although I would not revisit from disgust at your attitude — and personally not if it’s stealing ( as in downloading a currently sold game ), but others can; and whatever little tricks are there to stop image copying, I can think of half a dozen instant ways to defeat that; and I’m certainly not expert in computers.
If you don’t want anything copied, there is one sure way to prevent it: don’t put in on the internet.
My own blog is currently down indefinitely: I have never dreamt of objecting if people copied anything, including my own golden words, with or without acknowledgement. These things are trivial and unworthy of consideration in a not indefinite life. In the meantime, some can access it through Wayback and I am very, very grateful to them for that.
As you say, it should be forever.
No, people also get sued out of existence for unauthorized torrenting of TV shows and movies. It doesn’t matter whether you’re reproducing a web page or a video file; if you’re doing so without the copyright holder’s permission,* and they are bothered and competent enough to catch you, then they can use legal action (or the threat thereof) to make you stop.
*And, of course, if the fair use/fair dealing provisions of copyright law don’t apply in your case.
I believe that expression came from Al Gore shortly after he invented the internet.
Perhaps the internet should be forever, but in reality it isn’t. One of the big areas of concern in librarian and archival circles these days is the lack of an organized strategy for the preservation of digital and electronic journal resources. This page includes a link to a PowerPoint presentation about a joint effort by Cornell University and Columbia University Libraries to analyze the problem and develop strategies for ensuring preservation.
It’s common in scholarly research to look at the sources cited by a particular article that you are interested in, following the author’s chain of research backward. This is easy to do if the sources are to be found in print journals, which are widely preserved in many libraries. What many scholars are finding when they try to do that with digital resources is that URLs cited in an article no longer work, and trying to find that original article you are looking for can become a real challenge. Cornell and Columbia, for example, found that only 15-20% of the e-journal titles in their collections were being preserved in a systematic way.
“The internet” is more than selfies and social media posts–there are more and more magazines and journals that exist only in digital form, and the research being published in those journals is in real danger of being lost if there isn’t a far more systematic effort to ensure that these resources will be preserved securely.
It really depends on the cost of storage and hosting, I imagine. Something like a Usenet archive is probably small potatoes compared to something image/video heavy like you’d see these days, and might be retained longer as a result.
So your freshman year posts on alt.sex.furries may end up haunting you until the end of days, but last year’s homage to ***goatse ***may end up deleted in a short time for space and relevance constraints.
But as a general rule of thumb, the notion that something MAY persist forever on the internet is a good one to keep in mind when posting things. In other words, if you don’t want your grandchildren in 2045 potentially looking up your alt.sex.furries posts or seeing pictures of you wasted in the corner at some New Year’s Eve party 5 years ago, use a fake email address or don’t let your picture get taken.
I’m guessing this is a joke, but cite? :dubious:
This is one of the cases where Murphy’s Law is really handy. If you need information, like in the journals MrAtoz mentioned, then it will probably go away in a few years. But if you’re worried about something embarrassing like your nude pics or old livejournal hanging around, they will probably end up preserved forever. It’s not that everything on the internet necessarily lasts forever, it’s that it can.
Back in the early 1990s, people were warning others that anything they posted on usenet could come back to haunt them years later. This may be a dark period for the OP, but it does date all the way back to then.
Of course, back then folks thought that usenet would always be around. They didn’t anticipate it being pretty much replaced by private message boards like the SDMB.
The real problem I have with the Wayback Machine is it will respect no-follow from current site owners that have nothing to do with the past owner.
For instance, if I have a site carryon.com and have 10 years available on the Wayback Machine and let that domain name carryon.com expire, the Wayback Machine will still have it.
Then let’s say the Acme Company buys up the name carryon.com five years later and tells the Wayback Machine not to index the site, the Wayback Machine will not serve up the content under my site, even thought the Acme Company had nothing to do with and has no claim or copyright on the materials.
Which is good, because it hasn’t been—at least, not entirely. In recent years technical newsgroups have been largely supplanted not by private message boards but by the Stack Exchange model. This model shares an important similarity with Usenet in that the messages are freely distributable. Permission to redistribute was implicit and informal on Usenet, whereas on today’s Stack Exchange sites users agree to release their contributions under a free content licence. The contributions can then be downloaded and republished by third-party sites. The model is less distributed than Usenet, however; instead of a collection of independent and coequal news servers exchanging messages, you tend to have a centralized, privately operated server which other sites can freely mirror but can’t contribute anything back to.
Of course, like traditional message boards, Stack Exchange sites exist on the Web, and feature hypertext and have facilities for moderation, user management, etc. But most message boards don’t have the more open or laissez-faire licensing model of Usenet and Stack Exchange.
It’s not just about formal archives, either. Suppose I find a funny (or embarrassing, or otherwise notable) picture online, and save it to my hard drive. Shortly thereafter, the original poster removes the picture. But then, years later, something comes up where that picture’s relevant again, and I dig it up on my computer and re-post it somewhere. For many years, that picture wasn’t publicly accessible, but it was on a computer that could be connected to the Internet. And even though it seemed to be gone, now it’s back.
Which model too is passing.
Of course Social Media is part of the problem and solution to that transition; and the big boys there will freeze on to everything as long as they last, even if they tell you it has been erased — but the format of Facebook and Twitter is conducive neither to conversation nor rereading at length.
Meddlesome old ladies have been destroying collections and random old stuff not useful in their eyes since the dawn of time. Kinda like ants, only more mindless. What are the chances of them restoring a stuck ancient hard disk when sorting out a deceased’s effects, and not just chucking it in the bin ?
Technically there could be if the site logs every piece of content that comes it’s way. But even if it did, there is not telling how difficult it would be to obtain and search that archived information.
The point is that once you post something on the internet, you don’t have control over it anymore. It can get archived, reposted, forwarded, saved such that it could always exist somewhere. Possibly resurfacing at the most inopportune times.
OTOH, there’s so much crap out there, chances are your relatively mundane content will just get lost and whither away over time.
Oh, sure, it can still go away. I probably threw out thousands of great pictures on my dad’s old hard drive after he died, because they were lost in amongst millions of mediocre ones, and nobody has the patience to look through all of them. But the point is, it can resurface.
What’s more, many of the qualities that would make one want a picture to disappear are precisely the ones that make it more likely to resurface. If someone posts a picture of a cute cat, or a nice view of a mountain, they’re not going to care if anyone sees it ten years from now, and since there are so many cute cats pictures and scenic views out there, they’ll probably just be lost in the clutter-- Even if they are still in some archive somewhere, nobody will notice or care. But post something like a picture of yourself urinating into a crematory urn, and people are going to remember that one. Well, I presume so. I don’t know from experience.
There’s two ways I can take “The internet is forever”. One is the way Pantastic explains it: a good rule of thumb when deciding what to post online is that it will always be there, forever, for your grandkids and enemies alike to find for the rest of your life. Be careful, don’t post anything you don’t want people to see in perpetuity.
The other way is as a design principle: The web should be treated like it will last forever. Don’t change your URL scheme every year or two, don’t leave a trail of 404s and broken links all over the web.
But I suspect it usually refers to the former. I see Snapchat pictures all over the internet now, despite the fact that they don’t store photos and any “snapchat” is supposed to disappear in 10 seconds. Just because you set it up on facebook so that only your friends can see it, or some company guarantees they’ll erase it in a few minutes doesn’t mean that someone can’t screenshot it and put it up on Buzzfeed for all to see for as long as Buzzfeed exists.
I’d almost guarantee there’s a browser plugin or app that lets those pictures get automatically saved as they show up.