We shouldn’t rely on the Internet Archive when we don’t have to. It is a nonprofit that has faced significant legal challenges in recent years, and it has many other priorities. It’s a backup in case of disaster and a historical record, not a replacement. I love it and its value is immaculate, but it is asking too much of it to clean up every mess like this.
There’s also the print archives, which are not available online.
Then that's an issue for the Library of Congress or whoever. It's completely unreasonable to expect any private business to somehow maintain a record of their archives ad infinitum especially if they're no longer in business and there aren't any employees. Certainly non-journalistic corporate records of all sorts die with the company unless someone else has kept and shared a copy.
There’s a concept called corporate responsibility, and this fits neatly into it. It is irresponsible if you deal in information as a business and you do not have a plan to protect what you’re building long-term.
It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website.
>It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website.
No. I didn't actually. I probably signed up to produce (hopefully) quality journalism. But I didn't sign up to be an archive for the ages. And I'm not sure how I would even do so after I'm no longer there and have no revenues or employees. I can donate paper copies to the local library but that's basically just kicking the can down the road given that local libraries don't have infinite resources or space to maintain collections and, in fact, routinely sell off books that aren't checked out.
The British Library is having a few problems with their computers right now, but for the UK they are intended to be the people who have arbitrarily large resources and space to maintain their collection. The theory is that they are entitled to be given a copy of everything ever published in the UK, print and digital.
In the US, you only send a physical copy to the LoC if you're registering a copyright so you can collect damages in the case of a copyright infringement. Not sure how common that is outside of maybe major publishers.
Then you’re an irresponsible newspaper owner. You exist to serve the community, and your community isn’t served if you decide one day to force someone else to clean up the archives. That’s your job, revenue or no.
Part of the problem is the potential loss of public value in the form of the undigitized archive, and archive.org provides no solution for that.
Now, is it the responsibility of organization X or person Y to preserve this value? I’m not sure, but that seems to be a separate (albeit also interesting) question.
This seems to be a problem (among others in this story) which Google could answer to.
One thought that comes to mind is that no site's reputation should automatically survive transfer of ownership of that site.
If a site's new owners share the mission and custodial mission of the original owners, fine. If not, the site starts from zilch. Or better: negative assertion value given the long history of link-farming and its exceedingly well-understood common weal costs.
