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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree.

I guess the answer is "don't mess with your old site", but that's also impractical.

And I'm sorry, but if it's my site, then it's my site. I reserve the right to mess about with it endlessly. Including taking down a post for whatever reason I like.

I'm sorry if that conflicts with someone else's need for everything to stay the same but it's my site.

Also, if you're linking to my article, and I decide to remove said article, then surely that's my right? It's my article. Your right to not have a dead link doesn't supercede my right to withdraw a previous publication, surely?

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You can go down this road, but it looks like you're advocating for each party to simply do whatever he wants. In which case the viewing party will continue to value archiving.

I certainly don't know about legal rights, but I think the ethical thing is to make sure that any writings published as freely accessible should remain so forever. What would people think if an author went into every library in the world to yank out one of their books they no longer want to be seen?

I do think the author is wrong to immediately post links to archived versions of sources. At the least, he could link to both the original and archived.

Publishing on your own website is more akin to putting up a signboard on your front lawn than writing a book for publication.

People are free to view it and take pictures for their own records, but I could still take it down and put something else up.

Why is that the most ethical thing to do?

As a motivating example, I wrote some stuff on my MySpace page as a teenager that I'm very glad is no longer available. They were published as "freely accessible" and indeed, I wanted people to see it. But when I read it back 15 years later, I was more than a little embarrassed about it, and I deleted it - despite it also having comments from my friends at the time, or being referenced in their pages.

No great value was contained in those works.

I another 15 or 20 years you might want to see the content again. I hope you saved it somewhere.

I might, but I might want to see a whole lot of other things from my past, too.

Forgetting is part of living, y'know?

I'm not sure I agree. I know that journalism (as a discipline) considers this ethical. I kinda get that this is part of the newspaper industry as a public service - that withdrawing publication of something, or changing it without alerting the reader to the change, alters the historical record.

But no-one has a problem with other creative industries withdrawing their publications. Film-makers are forever deciding that movies are no longer available, for purely commercial reasons. Why is writing different? Why is pulling your books from a library unethical but pulling your movie from distribution is OK?

I think we either need to extend this to all creative activity, or reconsider it for writing.

> But no-one has a problem with other creative industries withdrawing their publications

I wouldn't say no one has a problem with this. It does happen, but it certainly doesn't make everyone happy. I for one would like for all released media to be available, or at least not actively removed from access.

This has a very easy answer for me: It's not ethical for film makers to decide that movies are no longer available.

Copyright was created to encourage publication of information, not to squirrel it away. Copyright should be considered the exception of the standard - public domain.

Why not?

Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made?

If you are a software developer - is all of the code you've ever written still accessible online, for free? (To the legal extent that you are able, of course.)

Have you written a blog before, or did you have a MySpace? Have you taken care to make sure your creative work has been preserved in perpetuity, regardless on how you feel about the artistic value of displaying your teen emotions?

Consider why you feel it is unethical for the author or persons responsible for the work to ever stop selling it.

> Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made?

This boils down to the public domain, IMO. We have made a long practice of rescuing art from private caches and trash bins to make them publicly available after the artists' passing (the copyright expiring); regardless of their views on what should happen with those works.

> Consider why you feel it is unethical for the author or persons responsible for the work to ever stop selling it.

Selling something and then pulling it down is fundamentally an attempt to create scarcity for something that would otherwise be freely available. It's a marketing technique that capitalizes on our fear of missing out to make a sale.

Again, the right to even sell writings was enshrined in law as an exception to the norm of of it immediately being part of the public domain, in an effort to encourage more writing.

Not sure we need any more encouragement on that front ;)

Sure, after I'm dead, you can do with my stuff whatever you like.

But while I'm alive.... it's my stuff and I can do with it what I like. Including tearing it up because I hate it now and don't want anyone to look at it.

It seems like this is conflating two issues: 1) The right of others to copy your work. 2) The obligation of the author to make the work available.

This thread stems from the second; about whether a site owner is justified in deleting or rearranging old pages/information on their website.

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