In these days of copyright maximalism I often think of all the fragments by ancient authors that we only know because they were quoted extensively by others.
We should not expect the web to stay up, the links to stay fresh, the posts to remain available. No, it’s entropy all the way: technology comes and goes, servers come and go, pages are written and get deleted, people are born and die, and everything they ever built is pulled down as capitalism keeps eating us and our works.
Here’s my wish: link if you can but quote extensively and fight copyright maximalism. Save our culture! Some of our works might survive into the far future and the quotes they bear are the life boats of our thoughts.
I still need to get into the habit of archiving web posts I like. I'm very unhappy about that. I started saving all the PDFs I liked, read, skimmed or intended to read, just in case I need find them again. It's a start, but not enough.
It hurts my brain that Sophocles was so prolific, so famous, so beloved – and we got seven plays out of a hundred and twenty. 😭 And that’s one of the authors with complete plays available. All pre-Socratic philosophy relies on testimonia. 😭 😭
Thanks to @alcinnz@floss.social and @Greta@fosstodon.org for the conversation back in 2023.
This message is brought to you not only by the film studios cancelling shows they already produced in order to save on taxes, nor by studios dumping TV archives, nor by search engines letting the USENET archive deteriorate, nor by the copyright owners eager to prey on any that would restore old movies that are rotting away due to age, hoping to leech any value somebody else might create, nor by thoughts of a generation of people entrusting their culture to the Internet where companies fail and servers die and nothing of value survives the coming apocalypse. No. It's because the artifacts of our lives and our culture are no longer made of clay and stone to last for a thousand years, nor paper or wood to last for centuries, and we've handed them over to corporations that don't care. All they care for is profit.
We need to take back what we can.
We need to keep our own archives.
#Copyright
Per megabyte of storage, written text stores the most information out of all media. – The critical window of shadow libraries
📚 The largest truly open library in human history. ⭐️ We mirror Sci-Hub and LibGen. We scrape and open-source Z-Lib, DuXiu, and more. 📈 36,615,662 books, 103,196,895 papers — preserved forever. – Anna’s Archive