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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

Youtube is the wrong place for this sort of thing, unfortunately.

Archive.org is the right place for it.

Youtube banned the archivist Jeff Quitney a few years ago. This particularly stings because a lot of wikipedia articles still cite and link to videos he uploaded.

You can find (most of?) his videos here now: https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me

There was a Danish church organist I came across on YouTube, who had worked his way through pretty much every Danish hymnal/school song book, and many Swedish and Norwegian ones too. He'd been at it for years. Then suddenly he was gone. I assume one too many of the songs he'd played must have had been too recent, and got copystriked.

It's pretty sad that even marginal, plainly non-commercial work of an archival nature isn't left alone.

> I assume one too many of the songs he'd played must have had been too recent, and got copystriked.

I bet whatever songs got him banned were in the public domain, but ContentID thought it sounded too much like a copyrighted recording of the same song. This sort of thing happens all the time to musicians who upload themselves playing classical songs. It's infuriating.

archive.org is good for public domain content, which this clearly is not. The right place for this would be offline tape archive.

You would think youtube would be fine with public domain content too. But this is not necessarily the case. Besides copyright strikes, youtube will also take videos down because they contain controversial content that advertisers don't like. They don't evaluate videos in the context of the video being old archived content representing old values from a different era.

Particularly, I believe Jeff Quitney's channel (which was mostly old aerospace videos made by the US government, but was generally for whatever old film he got his hands on) got banned because some of the videos were old political propaganda which expressed views which are now verboten.

The IA hosts lots of non-public-domain videos, including loads of rare ripped-from-VCR material. Copyright status rarely is an issue unless a copyright holder finds a specific video and makes an explicit DMCA claim against it.

And even then, nothing is ever really deleted, just non-visible, for now…

True. That or something like a Peertube instance.

Or Odysee

Just found this site not long ago. I like the old youtube feel with new interface.

The content skews a little more fringey though. But otherwise agree.

I don't know what the recommendations are based on but I get a lot of "Start a business easily" type motivational videos and IT related content. Which ones are you seeing?

Or even better: "that and". No reason to put all eggs in one basket, no? Especially when copying virtual eggs is so easy.

Archive.org should operate a peertube instance.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/twitter.com/Tayl...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/amren.com

Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

No reason or explanation given, or hint at who excluded it.

To be clear: I'm not suggesting he archive a youtube video using the Wayback machine. (Does this even work?)

I am suggesting he upload the files directly.

https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup

https://github.com/etnguyen03/docker-tubeup

For those of us at home, Taylor Lorenz is the niece of Roger Macdonald, creator of The Internet Archive's "Television Archive".

Is there any reason to suspect it's something besides the person behind the content requested their domain be excluded? Or IA behaving as they legally should and always have?

Yes - the Archive's refusal to provide a reason. They don't get to have both the privilege of opaquely excluding content, and the assumption that all exclusions are for the most faultless reasons.

Why would they provide a reason for a standard procedure? I'm fairly certain their exclusion guidelines are documented on their site.

Are the content owners complaining about a desire to be archived but IA is blocking them? As if not, I don't see the issue.

This forum thread documents that websites can be excluded for various reasons, including complaints by people other than the website/domain owner: https://archive.org/post/778/exclusions-from-the-wayback-mac...

I'm sure there's some guideline somewhere giving themselves blanket excuse to do anything they want, then hide behind secrecy and hope people will assume the best. What I'm not sure is why such duplicity being "standard" makes it any better.

>including complaints by people other than the website/domain owner:

Yes, they are legally required to listen to the copyright owner's request. In your linked example, that was the church of scientology. In your earlier post, that would be whoever was writing the tweets. Twitter could also choose to block their requests as the wayback machine would also grab their copyrighted code, but choose not to.

You're making a documented legal requirement sound like a shady partisanship. Unless there are examples of these people wanting their content archived and the IA refusing, I don't see your point. Anybody is free to tell the IA not to archive their copyright material.

> You're making a documented legal requirement sound like a shady partisanship

Unless keeping the cause of removal secret is also a legal requirement, then this is by definition shady. And you assume that because some removals are results of legal complaints, then all are. It is Archive's choice to keep us in the dark regarding removals, and it is our choice not to trust them for it.

I assume all unarchived content is unarchived because of their established policy for not archiving things, which is the copyright holder refusing archiving. Why would I assume otherwise?

We aren't being kept in the dark, we know the reason some content is unarchived and they say which content is unarchived.

Your complaint is like going to a store with posted hours after closing and demanding an explanation for why they aren't letting you in. It's possible there's some vast conspiracy to block you from shopping, bit it's more likely they're following the posted rules.

> I assume all unarchived content is unarchived because of their established policy for not archiving things, which is the copyright holder refusing archiving. Why would I assume otherwise?

Because of their deliberate policy of secrecy that forces you to assume, instead of know. As this is the 3rd time I repeat this same point, it will also be the last.

I directly addressed this with my following two paragraphs. It's not secrecy, we're fully aware of why they were unarchived and have no reason to think there's any other reason.

For the second example it's pretty clear why it's excluded:

https://www.amren.com/robots.txt

    User-agent: ia_archiver
    Disallow: /

For the first example, it sounds like[1] she requested that her page be excluded. It sounds like[2] the Internet Archive allows you to request that.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/taylor-lorenz-twitter-page-exc...

[2] https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...

A personal archive is a right place, with some file-sharing service to share...

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