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Comment by giblfiz | Hacker News Reader

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

SOMEONE SHOULD KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF OUR PRECIOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE.

They could even keep in on the internet!

We could call it the "Internet Archive"

And with this amazing technology, there could even be a way we could go way back and look at things that were published before, right on the internet as well.

We could call it the "wayback machine"

Oh wait: http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress....

Seriously though, three out of four times when I see someone crying "but our precious cultural heritage" it's something that has already been taken care of by archive.org, or that it would be trivial to have them help out with, instead of trying to force the hand of some corporate giant.

Did you know that archive.org even has a special legal exemption to ignore copyright law for archiving software?

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Relying on an underfunded nonprofit to protect information incompletely is never going to be as good as having access to the original information source. I could point to many reasons for this, but let me start with just one: The internet has been around as a mainstream entity for just 30 years. The newspaper has 155 years of archives. Those archives have not been put on a number of vintage newspaper archive sites, making this information impossible to access.

Have you ever dealt with newspaper archives? Morgues of old content? They are often complex to manage and digitize. The Internet Archive, being asked to manage the literal history of the internet, has a massive backlog. It would be significantly better if someone who actually was up close and had an organizational interest in managing it could do it instead, because that makes the lift far easier to deal with.

The Internet Archive is an important tool, but it is not the silver bullet you think it is. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It is the recovery option of last resort, and it puts a lot of pressure on the organization to treat them as a simple replacement for content that should just be online. Any researcher worth their salt will tell you that.

Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.

> Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.

Holding it for ransom is one "good" use for it.

Given their track record, I honestly imagine they just don’t care. See what they did with Gambling Times to get an idea of how they treat a publication with a deep archive.

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