Aren't you glad you didn't cite this webpage?
ssnat.com
ssnat.com
From the first two paragraphs: "Supreme Court opinions have come down with a bad case of link rot. According to a new study[1], 49 percent of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions no longer work.
This can sometimes be amusing. A link in a 2011 Supreme Court opinion[2] about violent video games by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. now leads to a mischievous error message[3]."
1. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/futureoftheinternet/2013/09/22/...
To solve the problem, we're launching our own link shortener this month, and printing our own shortened links in the magazine. That way we can control what happens when link rot sets in, whether redirecting or caching content on our own servers if necessary (and allowed by copyright).
The side benefit is that all our printed links can be easy to read and type, an important usability concern when dealing with print. A little self-referential branding on the shortener doesn't hurt, either.
And until it's a common idea it would be helpful to annotate such shortened links so that someone unfamiliar with the publisher will recognize them as having a printed expansion included. Superscript "*" usually refers to a note on that page, so perhaps a superscript ">>"?
I suppose one might argue that this is an educational use. It's for future academics and has no commercial impact.
No citation is guaranteed to be readable after a certain amount of time. All citations are merely a reference for identify the resource that you're looking for, and you need to find it yourself in a library or from the publisher. But the publisher may not exist, you may not be able to find libraries with copies, etc. So, you can only do so much.
But if you cite the URL and date, and at least one alternative way to access the content like the Wayback Machine or WebCite or your own, you give people a pretty good chance.
Perhaps there needs to be a peer-to-peer web citation database that publishers, libraries, and individuals can join. When a book or journal contains a web citation, the publisher archives a copy of that page in their database. When a library or individual buys a book, they can pull the archived copies from the publishers. This will ensure that as long as someone out there who has a copy of the book has also maintained their web citation database and is on the network, you can pull the citations from them.
I believe that archiving of publicly available material, as archive.org does and Google's cache does, is considered not to be copyright infringement (as long as it obeys the limits in robots.txt and noarchive meta tags), as it is sufficiently transformative. So this shouldn't be a problem unless someone explicitly requested that the page not be archived, in which case you probably shouldn't rely on it for a citation.
but mostly to link to the online version of the site the newspaper owned. it was a way to give out more data for a news piece that could not fit in the paper. Usually external urls were printed in the paper anyway.
After the paper has been submitted to a journal, the journal staff checks that the provided Perma.cc link actually represents the cited material. If it does, the staff “vests” the link and it is forever preserved. Links that are not “vested” will be preserved for two years, at which point the author will have the option to renew the link for another two years.
That seems odd to me. Could they simply publish their mappings periodically to avoid being able to fully comply with takedowns?
I mean, the article using the link is already published, what legitimate reason could there ever be to destroy a link in it? What would these people issuing the hypothetical takedown do if the author of the paper had just included the link itself?
I'm just thinking about articles that could be 10-15 years old (10-15 years from now mind you.), you could have a substantial database of links to maintain and keep updated, not a small task.
That seems worse to me. Sometimes you can gain some info by just the hostname, and pages in the URL. Now all you'll see is random numbers.
And are you really going to spend the money to check every url you have ever published? You have to do it by hand you know. A tool can help but won't tell you if the content of the page changed.
If you want to do this properly use global footnote numbering in each issue. Publish the real URL and the page title (very important since you can google for those words). Each url gets a footnote number that is unique in that issue and you print the number near the url.
Readers can lookup a url by the magazine issue and footnote number.
Periodically iterating through a set of links and comparing the returned content to a cached copy is trivial to implement.
So as I said, a tool can help, but it won't be trivial, and you'll still have lots of manual work.
There are games in which a player can take on the
identity and reenact the killings carried out by
the perpetrators of the murders at Columbine High
School and Virginia Tech.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/20/school-shooter-video-gam...
In the spirit of the reference, there was a high-quality simulation of the JFK assassination, with the user acting as Oswald. Made a big splash of outrage in the news and was soon pulled (the contest to reenact "the shot" didn't help). It's still available if you look.
BUT...keep in mind endless movies & books depicting gratuitous violence. Alito hasn't articulated a difference on "freedom of speech" grounds.
http://crossref.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier http://www.doi.org/
(I work for CrossRef)
The only solution is some form of legalized archiving. We need the right to copy for archiving without profit, or something. Not sketching out a full, legal solution here, just pointing out that it has to include some form of right-to-archive.
Just throwing it out there - this is (in some sense) one of the intended purposes of the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress already even announced a few years back that they were planning on archiving every public tweet.
Having them archive every video referenced in official documents (such as a Supreme Court decision) isn't that much of a stretch.
It's just not possible. There's only one way to fix these problems, and it's not something most people are ready to accept. It's to turn the internet inside out, from a client-server model to a store-and-forward model. It's to treat web content more like ebooks than like fliers posted to a cork board.
There are upsides, like decentralization, and downsides, like everybody knowing exactly what data you're asking for if it's strictly addressed by hash (no way of obscuring your political activities from an oppressive regime by using an unrelated name for common data).
Whether PDF is an appropriate format is a different story.
Providing a copy of the content that you claim is the source does not come anywhere close to definitively proving that that content is the content at the cited source on the identified date.
All it does is provide what you claim to be the original source, which, assuming that you do it honestly, provides the content backing the characterizations for which you cited, and the context for any limited excerpts you quoted. So, its useful, but not as proof that you saw the content in the cited source on that date.
this was submitted to HN some time ago. It automatically pulls the website and creates a certificate of content and date that is cryptographically signed.
14 Webley, “School Shooter” Video Game to Reenact Columbine, Virginia Tech Killings, Time (Apr. 20, 2011), http://newsfeed.time.com/2011 / 04 / 20 / school - shooter - video - game - reenacts-columbine-virginia-tech-killings. After a Web site that made School Shooter available for download removed it in response to mounting criticism, the developer stated that it may make the game available on its own Web site. Inside the Sick Site of a School Shooter Mod (Mar. 26, 2011), http://ssnat.com.
It's basically highlighting how there's a lot of linkrot, which makes re-reading old Supreme Court decisions difficult.
What are they thinking? ;/