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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

So Mark deletes this from the Internet, and a bunch of other people put it back up? For people that were concerned enough about him to send the police to his house a few hours ago, it seems weird that they are now saying "fuck the author's wishes" and putting it back online.

I guess if there isn't enough Internet Drama, we have to make our own? Can we go back to whining about node.js? At least I found that mildly funny...

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Being concerned about the author's well-being doesn't imply that one ought to 'respect his wishes' with regard to a CC-licensed work that many other people rely upon as a productive resource.

Mark has produced some exceptional reference works and released them under an open license. They certainly ought not be removed from existence on anyone's personal whim, original author or not, no matter how much we sympathize with his situation, whatever that might be.

Put another way, republishing an otherwise unavailable CC-licensed/open-source-licensed work is explicitly respecting the author's wishes, the author that published it under that license.

I doubt (but obviously don't know) Mark wanted to excise his work from human memory, he just didn't want the personal responsibility of maintaining those resources/participating in their development as a leader. That's the wish worth respecting.

Actually, by releasing the content under a CC license, the author clearly chose to have this exact phenomenon happen. He may no longer wish to host the books himself, which is reasonable and acceptable -- but since the CC license allows republishing, this behavior by others is also reasonable and acceptable. The only drama being made by this action is by wonks like you who ignore the basic facts of sharing based licensing to cop some sort of bs superior attitude.

Not to be a dick but pretty sure it's well-recognized as an infallible truth that once you put something on the Internet, it's in the world forever. It is never gone, no matter what you want.

I'm sure Mr. Pilgrim is well aware of this fact.

I like the idea that 'the people' who called the police and 'the people' who got diveintohtml5.info up and running are obviously the same people, cause they like, use the internet and stuff.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I agree it is good that someone had the good taste to bury the HN stories.

But DiveInto* is good content, and the internet needs more content like it.

Shows one downside of digital publishing, where the author can just throw a fit and delete all their good content. If it was on books, they couldn't do a thing.

It also shows an upside of digital publishing, where others can restore the useful content the same day if it was published under a CC license.

Dude, it was CC licensed.

Just because he took down his copy doesn't mean he wanted it to disappear completely. Where did he explicitly state that? Nowhere! You're making a big leap there.

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