It's not yours anymore once it's public. It's like saying "when I do something crazy in public I want to be able to make everyone forget about it later on". That's not how things are supposed to work.
> I don't want anyone to be able to read it anymore
People can still have local copies so you have absolutely NO CONTROL.
Yes, but under current copyright laws they are not allowed to distribute them without your consent.
In practice, the nature of the web allows everyone to keep copies of everything if they want. But if someone republishes it, then you need to use the DMCA process (for American websites) to take that content down if it violates copyright.
Going back to print, what if you print something you don't want out there anymore? Well if people have already bought your book or magazine, they have bought a right to that physical copy. They can even sell the book or magazine to anyone else (granted that the content isn't illegal).
Interesting how the landscape and conversation has shifted. Sadly, it doesn't appear possible to even have a definition of publishing that both maintains the right of the public to access information, and allows for individual privacy.
Options like disabling crawling are insufficient, essentially web servers have to read author's minds to divine their intent in order to not screw up. Don't crawl certain kinds of content and you might be accused of discrimination, providing services to one group and not others.
Ownership is a weird thing.
It's not because they say it exists that it makes it valid in practice.
Says who?
On the internet, everything is as fresh as this morning, forever. No longer do we have "do you remember when so-and-so used to say that stupid stuff, boy have they changed!" Now it's "look, here's a link to so-and-so staying stupid stuff, now we know what they really think!"
The idea that once something is in the public it should remain there firmly embedded, forever, makes sense on the surface, but definitely seems to break down when examined closely, in my opinion.
It's been deleted by its author and archive sites are the only places where I can find copies. I've saved a copy for myself just in case. If you use an article like this as a source, it'd be nice if there were a copy somewhere.
This is one of my favourite independent movies:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1527628
I bought a DRM-free copy from the writer/director back when they offered it on their website. The main website is still there, but the whole purchase/download system is broken and those domain seem to have expired/been purchased by someone else. I almost lost my copy of this movie, but luckily I found it on one of my off-site backups.
People talk about how much content there is being created, but there's an incredibly amount of content that's being lost forever. Even if it's still out there, search monoculture (today we have Google/Bing/DDG where once we had Lycos, Hotbot, Altavisa, etc. etc.) can effectively keep content from being accessible. There might be something nice about the ephemeral nature of that content, but there's also something sad there as well.
To go back to your point, if someone publishes an article, it is nice to be able to see it again in the future. If they don't want it backed up, there are procedures like DMCA (if the author didn't publish the content to the public domain and the archiver is based in the US).
As a side note, we've already seen on here that the Right to be Forgotten is more about censorship than anything else.
Eventually we'll all go extinct, our sun will burn out, and everything that ever was and is will be lost. So preservation efforts really only go so far, and this brings up some more deep philosophical ideals about the ephemeral nature of what we produce more than anything else.
On the other points, I would believe this is related to the fact I personally (and I take most here) have spent way too much time on the internet on the past decade(s). I find it amusing the number of times I remember something I've seen or read in the past and how hard it can be to find it again. Or the number of broken links among old blog posts and articles.
Lastly, our lives are way too goddamn short. Thinking that far into the future is hardly productive in my opinion, even if you consider it can be very enlightening.
That's what AI wants you to think. ;)
I think there's an important point here about the difference between access and attribution. People talking about the right to be forgotten are generally opposed to attribution - someone like the top-level poster wants to be able to un-claim a blog post. But people talking about archiving are split between attribution and access - wanting to simply be able to see content, regardless of where it came from.
Two of my favorite bloggers have deleted large swathes of their work, both for reasons I think are inapplicable to me. In one case, they got a job in medicine and removed lots of content that might be unoffensive generally, but could upset a hospital HR department. In the other case, I believe she was worried about the impact her work might have on suicidal people.
In each case, the author wanted to stop having a comprehensive, owned body of their writing, while I simply wanted access to the text. I could give a damn if they accept ownership of that writing - it had interesting ideas and I simply want to be able to read it again.
This isn't a distinction I see made often; work is either in its source location or archived in an attributed way. But there are some cases where I'd be quite happy to get un-attributed access to the actual content someone created.
"We were always at war with East Asia" and all that.
>To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
We, the people, trade our natural right of copying and selling anything we see for the benefit of increased dissemination of art and science.
Your integrity is kept perfectly pristine if your work only stays in your draw. The second you publish your work it is no longer yours.
Even worse is nyud.net, which essentially steals credit.
What sort of integrity is it, that can be adjusted by erasing your past actions, to hide the mistakes you've made and only present the successes?
The problem I see with once you've published something public - whether you've deleted it or not - is if and when they reference it (especially if it's older) in part or whole -- is if they reach out to ask you if since posting/writing something, if there are any comments or updates to it, so they then post that inclusion.
Perhaps your knowledge wasn't as evolved, therefore your understanding wasn't to conclusion - which is what the process of learning is all about. Perhaps you were going through a difficult time and you revealed things you're embarrassed about, and you have a fear of ridicule or other. That's where understanding and compassion then hopefully kicks in with the reader. If you can understand these processes yourself, and be able to forgive yourself and therefore others - or forgive others and therefore yourself - then great. If worry is strong and remains strong, then perhaps the solution is developing self-awareness to understand the nitty-gritty and nuances of emotion, to help understand the worry, where it comes from - and developing the tools and skills to help them settle.
Edit to add: You'd be surprised at what people deal with on a day-to-day basis or what they had to deal with in the past. Suffering, especially emotional suffering including discomfort and fear, is a strong teacher - it's something you have to develop to be open to - otherwise the ego mind will learn and want to logically control a situation, vs. managing it - which comes with developing self-awareness, therefore better self-control, and better self-regulation.
Where I'm at in my life, on my path, I currently fluctuate between having difficulty coping with chronic pain that I have to manage which affects my executive function and decision making, and between being very suicidal; most infuriating is that I have had success with healing some of the pain with stem cell injections, however for unreasonable/irrational decision that was made, I've been blocked from getting more from the doctor who first did them - and that has cascaded into making it challenging to find another doctor to continue them, I've come to the conclusion that our health-"care" system is very broken, and which I could go into the nuances of from my experiences, however I won't in this comment.
Yes, there will be assholes who will judge me for sharing that and think negatively for that, and they are people haven't developed those skills and understanding or compassion - at least not yet, or perhaps never, however we can forgive them for that - their genetics and life path, the environment they were born into wasn't up to them.
You are suggesting that the author of a flyer should be able to demand that everyone who took one burn it immediately, and have the force of law to ensure it happens.
That is not how copyright works. Copyright is intended to encourage the creation of new works, by granting for a limited time the exclusive right for an author to reproduce and copy their own works. Once those copies exist, and pass out of the author's possession, copyright does not grant any further control of them, other than to forbid those copies to be used to produce additional copies.
This, of course, raises the question of whether serving a digital document on an http archive server is violating the author's copyrights. A library may keep a copy of a pamphlet and allow patrons to view it without violating copyright. But web servers work by stamping out a perfect copy of the document and sending it out over the network. There is no physical embodiment of the document. If the archive were to display the document on a monitor, and then serve a video from a camera, pointed at that monitor, that would be analogous to viewing the physical copy of the pamphlet, but then that pointless fiction could be dispensed with by removing the monitor and camera and transmitting the digital rendering. So we have to fall back on the intent of the copyright act.
Clearly, the copyright act is intended to expand the amount of available works, by granting a temporarily profitable monopoly. Does the prevention of archiving further this purpose? Hell no. Archiving is essential for those works to eventually enter the public domain. When the original creator of a work has abandoned their attempt to monetize their efforts, to the point where they are now trying to destroy their work, it should escheat to the public domain immediately. If you didn't want it out there, the only remedy would have been to never publish it. You cannot erase prior publications by abusing copyrights. The law should not protect book-burners.
It's not legally different, but it's still different, which is something that I think people on both sides of this debate sometimes selectively forget. Before the web, those "street flyers" were pretty unlikely to go viral and be seen by millions of people. They were pretty unlikely to get, well, much farther than that street corner. And there certainly wasn't a widely-known and shared infrastructure dedicated to capturing copies of the flyer and preserving them indefinitely.
I don't know that there should be a "right to forget," but in the pre-digital era, things had limited circulation. They went out of print. You couldn't control what happened to copies after they were printed, no, but nobody could say, "You know what, I don't want this thing to go out of print, so I'm going to put it back into print whether the author likes it or not." To use your flyer example: I can't legally demand people who have my flyer burn it, but I can legally demand that people don't make copies of my flyer and hand it out on street corners of their choice for the next thirty years.
The closest thing the web has to the concept of "out of print" is, well, taking things offline. And a lot of things that go offline undoubtedly should be preserved. I use the Internet Archive all the time. But at the same time, I'm not convinced that the answer to someone saying, "Hey, this thing I put online 20 years ago and took down 10 years ago is something I'd really like to keep out of print" must always and forever be, "well, you should never put anything online that you'll ever reconsider at any point in your entire life, you fool."
Things went out of print because the unit cost of producing one extra copy was much higher than producing 10000 extra copies. As demand for copies tends to taper off over time, you eventually reach a point where you simply cannot produce just one extra copy at a cost lower than the price the next customer would be willing to pay for it.
No such pressure exists for digital reproduction. Every additional copy costs the same low, low amount. The author then has no reasonable argument for refusing to make an additional copy.
And yes, there was infrastructure for capturing and preserving copies of print flyers. It wasn't all-encompassing, and didn't catch everything, but there are many museums of ephemera now that have extensive collections of published material that was of limited circulation (and limited literary value). For those items that were expected to get thrown away or used as toilet paper, there was always the possibility that someone might have saved it, and it could still be around in some form 200 years later.
It is entirely reasonable for an author to demand that no one else make and distribute copies of their work. But in my opinion, if you can find the author, and make them a reasonable offer for a new copy of their copyrighted work, and they refuse to make one and sell it to you (or to license the right to make your own) then they have essentially abrogated their copyright. You would then be morally (but not legally) justified in copying that work from another source.
When something is published, the genie is out of the bottle. No law can stuff it back in. And copyright was intended to protect the livelihoods of creators, not to give them the ability to more easily destroy what they have wrought. Thus, whenever there is any confusion or ambiguity, I always personally interpret a copyright situation with the test "is there any way this might lessen the creator's ability to sell (or otherwise monetize) one more copy of this work?"
If the creator is no longer attempting to make money from a work, screw their copyrights. We granted them that limited monopoly to make enough money so that the effort of creation would be worthwhile to them. If they don't care to sell, I don't care to protect their ability to sell exclusively.
This is an incredibly bold and huge presumption which absolutely does not mesh with the Berne Convention to begin with.
When you publish and sell a book, you no longer control who that book is later given or sold to. You retain only rights over the ability to make copies, and even then, you can't block people from making copies for personal use.
If you have a blog you have to count with fact that an article will be on internet forever.
My advice is this - write an article today but publish it tomorrow (you'll have time for thinking about an article).
This is no different to burning books that the authors no longer support the views in.
I see this problem as an even bigger problem with kids. Kids put everything they do online, and they will probably be ashamed of a lot of these things later in life.
Comparing that to Facebook: I guess I shouldn't upload pictures on Facebook because it's against my right to want to see one of my old picture disappear later?
You are purposefully muddying the issue of access. If you upload your pictures on a password protected ftp server no one will know or care when you delete them. If you upload them on a publicly accessible website, despite what outdated laws on copyright say, you won't be able to withdraw them and that's a feature.
Facebook is a monstrosity that pretends to be a password protected server but leaks your data by design. Do not try to equate someone unpublishing a work after they wrote, uploaded and publicized it with someone removing a drunken status update that should have never been public in the first place.
Plenty of good. As a writer myself, sometimes just having these thoughts put out into form is a very gratifying process. When the inspiration hits you, nothing feels worse than not being able to express these thoughts and feelings in a way that feels appropriate.
Likewise, sometimes people write dumb things in a fit of passion. They write something that is a blemish on their otherwise fine history or that no longer reflects what they believe anymore.
While I'm on the side of the Internet Archive here, I can definitely appreciate that it's not an open and shut case. Sometimes the yearning for information to be free is at odds with our want for privacy. Tools like Medium, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are like the gun in the house to someone suicidal (to use a very bad analogy) - an easy and convenient tool that allows for a very bad spur of the moment decision to be made.
I know I've done stupid things on games and on message boards in the past, and I'm only so lucky that this data likely isn't available anymore. Some of it was me being a dumb kid. Some of it was me just being an angry kid, but I am 100% grateful that this information is only remember by myself and a handful of others. A very different past me had a very stringent set of beliefs which I now have come to accept were very bad beliefs, and I did bad things in general as a result of them.
Is it really fair that I have the benefit that time forgot all these dumb things I've done simply because I was born before a time when Twitter/Facebook were common place? Before data permanence was really possible on a global scale? I'm open to the idea of some review on archiving data like this; I want the Internet Archive to be able to archive this stuff, but it would be really nice if there was a way to vault it for a reasonable period of time as well by request. Otherwise, you end up in a position where no one wants to write or produce or do anything in a fit of passion as a result of knowing that everything is permanently preserved.
I don't have an answer aside from "vaulting" the data, and I don't think that's a good answer. But I also don't think it's black and white like you're trying to make it.
Our culture definitely needs to evolve a little and become more forgiving of youthful ignorance. That's really the only long-term solution.
Perhaps this is also a good use case for services like Hermit[1], which allows limited sharing among friends and other writers. The notion of "trying out" an idea on a platform with enormous public reach seems foolish at best. Comics test their new material in hole-in-the-wall dive bars for a good reason!
Again, I really don't have an answer. I would err on the side of caution and say IA should continue to back stuff up and it's wrong to set up the time-bombs that also affect IA. But I do feel we need a way to accommodate some privacy still without silencing people outright for just plain dumb opinions and ideas.
Rather, invest in teaching kids how to safely publish under pseudonyms or anonymously if they wish to publish their angst-ridden teenage vampire poetry. You can always abandon your connection to that work that way — even if the work lives on for all the world to see.
> Comparing that to Facebook: […]
You should indeed never upload anything that you might wish to expunge at a later date. You have the right to see an old picture gone from Facebook, but you don't have the means to enforce removing it from your cousin's private backup on their own computer.
We should punish mistakes. Especially stupid mistakes.
A sentiment that is harder to sell if people erase all evidence of their mistakes.
The publicizing of things said by then Presidential candidate Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 election would incentivize people to not talk in private. Should we have banned any details about the incident from being spread if the one who said it didn't agree with knowledge of what was said spreading?
If being able to undo what you wrote so that it won't be held against you is a good thing, why wouldn't being able to undo what you said so that it won't be held against you also be a good thing?
If think that you will ever want real control over the pictures, then yes, you should avoid posting them to Facebook. I'd think that that's fairly obvious.
Putting someone else's work on a different website and serving it to others would be similar to printing copies of someone else's books. If the author changes his views, it wouldn't be acceptable for someone else to print new copies of the book. Making a copy of a website for your own personal use would be much closer. I don't think anyone disagrees that you should be able to do that.
When the author burns their own book and forbids new ones from being made is the only time that it's acceptable to print new copies.
Need I remind you of the purpose of copyright?
>To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Do you mean acceptable from a legal point of view? Because I seriously doubt that it is.
The author's exclusive rights are only intended to be temporary. Once they're no longer secured, the work can be used by anyone for any purpose.
That depends entirely on the publishing contract's rights reversion stipulations. An author deciding that they do not want their book to continue being printed, purely because they have changed their views, will often find that they have very little legal right to do so.
Yes, definitely think before publishing, even if it's meant to be "private", say a self-destructing private message, because anything can be saved somehow.
On the other side, we change. Things that were relevant to me, things I genuinely thought to be true 16-18 years ago (I had a blog for a while now), I see a bit differently today, and I might like my current, tuned back views to be read, not the ancient ones from a disappointed teenager.