A niche band from Asia I loved as a teenager disbanded in the early 2000s. Due to legal reasons their work is in forever limbo, no Spotify, official YouTube etc. Best you can get is 2nd hand CDs on online marketplaces for a premium.
One guy was seeding a 4GB torrent over on PirateBay from 2008 with every song, music video, numerous interviews etc. Reasons like this is why pirating needs to stay alive. Legend made me want to seed it with him longterm. Now we’re 2 seeders strong.
Keep sailing pirates, and whenever possible please seed.
We all need to be our own archivists in this day and age. The internet isn’t forever, it’s a constantly burning Library of Alexandria. I’m glad you found your lost media again.
Even the Internet Archive is slowly eroding from the bottom :(
How do you mean? The lawsuits, or something else?
IA is not a sustainable project, and is built as a single point of failure. It has no transparency and no recovery plan if things go bad. Compare that to Anna’s Archive, a project that open sources all of their code and data so that things will continue running even if everyone involved disappears.
Ask yourself: if IA’s data was silently modified, would anyone be able to tell?
Archive the internet archive. /s
Maybe it could be mittigated by inolenenting a new feature to have every website capture receive a unique hash so that it can be checked?
There are definitely workarounds and mitigations that could solve a lot of the issues people have with IA. Unfortunately Jason Scott seems unwilling or unable to implement them. Based on what happened with the “textfiles” thing, I get the feeling he would rather see everything burn than give up any control. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
The issue isn’t that IA has problems, it’s that people have been pointing those problems out for years and nothing has changed. Eventually the disks are going to rot or the feds are going to come knocking and it’ll be too late.
To be clear, I’m not attacking Jason here. He’s running a great project using a lot of his own money and resources and I think it’s perfectly valid if he wants to keep an iron grip on how things work. There are real problems though, and it would be wrong to pretend there aren’t. We have to be prepared for a future where IA won’t be around forever, because nothing is around forever, and the IA isn’t an exception.
Society and everything as a whole.
It would need government level of intervention but even that might not be enough.
Just take a look at regular public libraries on how they fare. They look like they barely scrape by at times.
You’re doing the “assume everyone online is American” thing. If I take a look at my public libraries here in Australia, they’re thriving. My local is in a new building about a decade old. It has a music studio that’s free to use for 12-25 year olds, it’s open 10am-8pm every day except Sunday. I’m also barely scratching the surface on what it offers, and what it’s sister libraries in nearby suburbs offer too.
I am from Germany where libraries arent crippled to death.
Thing most libraries outside of major city centers don’t get the funding.
My local library doesnt have a manga section for example. The library in the next city at least has that but also requires a subscription or a single lending fee.
this was incredibly profound to me for some reason. you’re spot on, an eternal Alexandria.