2024-06-27 Keep your own archives
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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

2024-09-05. Anna's Archive. Thank you!

> 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