Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/25/mtv-news-website-vanishes-and-with-it-30-years-of-archived-stories.html
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Turn everything over to corporations, they said… what could go wrong, they said… 
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… for now. Nothing’s permanent anymore, and it’s very easy to get content memory holed from archive.org.
It’s really a shame. As always corporations ensure we can’t have nice things, especially if it becomes a cost center.
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This is why we need stable institutions (fed, state, local governments, colleges and university, public and private, etc) that can support archives. I appreciate the Internet Archive, but it has some issues, such as what just happened with books being made available by them, and with their organizational style, not to mention how their model allows for anyone to upload things, including problematic elements.
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Do they really even have it all? I was reading some stuff yesterday and had a quick glance today. Seems that not much is archived before 2001.
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As far as I know, my local libraries have old newspapers. Presumably these have exactly the same liability issues, but we don’t see lawyers going into the stacks and blanking out articles, or libraries throwing away the entire archive because of the possibility of something being found liable.
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I think you are underestimating the amount of effort (and expense) it would be to go through 30 years of content trying to make judgement calls on all of the items that may or may not be an issue in the future while also stripping out any photos or other copyrighted information. That is a large task.
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Of course not. So, in addition to having archives, we need archives that focus on specific things who can ensure a depth of material in that archive… For example, the National Archives is fucking VAST as far as an archive goes… but they don’t have everything. The Library of Congress is a good supplement, but even then, there are things that aren’t there. Various universities intersection nicely with what the federal government holds. Zines, for example, are one thing that might not exist in our national archives, but that can be found at various colleges and universities.
Just wait.
An archive should not have to worry about IP issues, because they should be covered under fair use provisions. They serve the public interest, not corporate interests. In this case, it’s an archive held by a private corporation, but it should exist in a place where those of us who study the past of popular culture can access, because writing history is IN the public interest. 
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We all laughed LAUGHED at that guy who had binders of websites he printed out. And now all reach out and beg for him to save us!
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Funny you should say that!
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Also, it strikes me that there is a whole class of individuals who spend their entire careers sorting through the implications of various kinds of laws, including copyright laws… Perhaps people seeking to craft an archive could ask those guys… 
NAH, better to give up before we even start!
Seems like that’s the new American motto! Give up now! It’s TOO expensive and hard!!! Are we really the same country to put people on the moon? Doesn’t seem like it lately.
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My memory of the dates is fuzzy (which in itself speaks of the need for an archive) but in the early 2000’s Elsevier was caught deleting articles from its online Science Direct database. The content was a copy of what was published in their print journals, including tables of contents, and when someone clicked on a link in the contents they’d get 404 Not Found.
At least one person on an Elsevier email list asked, “Are they also sending agents into libraries to cut the articles out of the print versions?”
Unfortunately now they don’t need to. So many libraries have gotten rid of their print holdings that articles can disappear and there’s no backup.
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Who needs information anywayz! I mean, history is already written, right? /s
Ugh… this whole shift to digital has been more destructive than people thought…
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The journal proceedings stacks at many research libraries are gone, replaced with a few computer terminals.
This is the grownup-world version of our kids’ (or our own) entire lives stored not in boxes of photos under a bed but on a Zip drive, or a hard drive, or a SSD, or gosh-forbid the cloud. Lost family stuff brings local pain, lost big things bring big pain.
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… newspapers and magazines don’t have the option of torching their old product, and yet somehow they cope with the forever liability
Wouldn’t it be normal, and make the lawyers happy, to donate the archives to a university?
Future historians are gonna be rather fucked for sources… or at least the sources are going to be pretty heavily weighed in certain directions…
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Forget MTV…they’ve done the same disappearing act to Comedy Central as well:
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So, a NYC Department of Transportation truck. Had it been a garbage truck, the city’s criminal underworld would have come under suspicion.
even that might be difficult.
a site as old as theirs might have had a bunch of different content management systems, with different parts of the site using different software, spanning multiple locations over time.
( they might not even know if they even shut it all down. they probably just rerouted the domain name. could well be a machine or 30 sitting there at their old addresses, waiting for requests. )
but even if you did manage to get the ones and zeros, you still often will need the specialized software, databases, programming languages, and hardware to access it.
scraping might be the easiest way to archive it, but would also likely miss a lot.
digital is just a terrible way to store anything important. 
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