Could data become part of UNESCO's world heritage? Nowadays alot of culture happens in the digital space and it's always a tragedy when huge amounts of cultural creations just vanish into nothing. Web archives are perhaps not enough, lots of content are inside walled gardens, convincing a company to release all that information is a different question of course :)
No. World heritage sites are of archeological interest, whereas marking and preserving only some internet properties perhaps less than a decade old, would only play into the hands of sycophants bent on gaming the UNESCO system for personal gain.
The reality is that an UNESCO site is something that warring factions should agree to avoid destroying with bombs and guns, even while they eviscerate each other amid very real bloodshed.
You can’t make such a promise that destroying a certain server in a data center may or may not cost the world something valuable. Furthermore, there are not warring factions in the equation, to threaten precious data centers housing your precious data.
You would waste UN resources on... bought and sold consumer products? Why not a clutch of warez d00dz cracked proprietary software? Who decides what world heritage is?
The wrong kind of war might seek to destroy your precious garbage, if there’s no obvious reason it’s special.
> You can’t make such a promise that destroying a certain server in a data center may or may not cost the world something valuable.
Think on a different level of abstraction. Cyberwar is a thing; cyberweapons are a thing. You could totally have rules about what online services state-sponsored malware shouldn't try to attack. It would make just as much sense to protect Archive.org as it would to protect the Library of Congress.
Except political motives exist to preserve the powers that be, and their culture.
There’s less skin in the game, when the preserved items are thousand year old buildings in ruins, of intrinsic interest to tourists from all walks of life.
Compare examples of physical architecture to bar fliers advertising happy hour and ladies night. Video game profiles rank closer to bar fliers, even if the architecture in ruins is the bar itself.
This discussion isn’t about profiles per se; Miiverse was essentially a game-visible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oekaki forum. It’s the drawings that are worth preserving, being actual acts of artistic creation.
I mean, you could still compare this to things posted up in a bar—but it’d be the doodles people have made on their placemats. Some of those placemat doodles are genuine works of art, you know!
The difference you premised your rant on is superficial. The point is that humans create things that become important to their societies. Sorry if you're upset that Mario and Link were integral cultural touchstones in my life and many others'. I assure you, these "consumer products" had a large effect on my path.
Communities die, people die, and more importantly, they change. While it used to be that if you wrote something stupid on a wall or carved it into a tree, with a natural expectation that it will get erased or destroyed over time, now even when behemoth social networks shut down, there are apparently enthusiasts which want to conserve every creepy pasta and highdea everywhere. Just because it can be done.
At best, the users should have been given the chance to download whatever they want for private use, and the rest should rightly get obliterated.
Many people would object less to Facebook if it probably deleted all content not marked "important" after a year, rather than creepily storing everything ever.
One of the most exciting archeological pieces we have from the Roman empire, is graffiti spouting the same mundane things people scrawl on bathroom walls today.
> At best, the users should have been given the chance to download whatever they want for private use, and the rest should rightly get obliterated.
This is a hard one. The right to be forgotten is probably something the average person should have.
But equally, human history can be understood and shaped by some of the most mundane things, and our descendants have a right to review that. To understand it.
I don't have a solution to it.
> Many people would object less to Facebook if it probably deleted all content not marked "important" after a year, rather than creepily storing everything ever.
It is not their storage of data I find creepy. It is the fact that this permanent storage is actively used, sold and traded. A deleted profile shouldn't be able to follow you around the web, and continue to build upon itself.
The "The right to be forgotten" applies to private information made public against a person's will, such as revenge porn or showing up in search engine listings. It does not apply to content willing contributed to a public community, like HN, reddit or Miiverse. What facebook does still applies, though, because a lot of the data they use, sell and trade is data their users think is private.
Because we can. Historians love glimpses into the mundane of past societies. For the first time in history it is actually possible to archive these mundane aspects of everyday life like we archive the "important" stuff.
Imagine how ecstatic historians we would if we suddenly discovered an archive of even 1% of the smalltalk that went on in bars during the 1800s.
They wont be alive in 100 years, but by then it would be to late to archive data we destroy today.
I have no problem with embargoing these massive archives for to protect the privacy of those involved while still allowing future historians access. For instance, the US census records do not become publically available until 72 years after the census was conducted.
In the case where the data was publicly accessible in the first place (as I believe to be the case here), I do not see any reason (EDIT: except copyright) to do this.
If we are talking about something like Facebook shutting down (or this case if the Miiverse had private conversations), I would be arguing for a similar embargo on private data.
> The entire Archiverse archives are posted under an open source license, free for mirroring or even personal download if you want to perform a deep, offline analysis. I hope you've got a 17TB hard drive lying around...
I'm curious about the legality of offering these under an open source license, since I'd assume that the original content isn't in the public domain yet? Unless Nintendo's TOS had placed these under that license itself?
Is it really a grey area? Surely it's just plain old copyright infringement?
If facebook shuts down it doesn't mean all multimedia content that was ever hosted there suddenly gets dumped into the public domain. At most you gave the company that run the site an irrevocable, international license to that content (depending on their TOS), it doesn't apply to everyone else and it didn't get put into the public domain or under some other open source license.
Nintendo is sending all users their post history so they can personally archive it if they wish. If anyone else archives it, it's just copyright infringement...
Personally, I respect the work that the Internet Archive and other archivers do, so this is definitely not a hill I'm willing to die on.
Indeed, they've run afoul of this before when mirroring sites, often niche ones that notice the uptick in traffic and whose users are attentive to their content rights.
It's an interesting conflict -- there is a benefit to saving things in case of site failure, but simultaneously it is a problem on a copyright basis, particularly for written works where the author themselves feels small next to the Internet Archive. They've walked a fine, fine line with various items like DOS abandonware games where the owners are potentially in more of a position to "lawyer up."
I don't understand why Nintendo has shut it down in the first place, in spite of its popularity. These community features can enhance user experience, especially when implemented right in the game. Why wouldn't they even continue Miiverse on later consoles like the Switch?
It's hard to be sure, but it seems like it could be a cultural shift more than anything else. The Wii, Wii U and 3DS had tons of little extra services and channels and what not that didn't directly relate to the games, and often felt like they were going for the 'toy' feel more than anything else. Meanwhile, the Switch seems to be designed like a simple games console with the games being the first and only priority and the extraneous stuff being cut out altogether.
Kind of like they wanted to go back to basics after the Wii U underperformed.
