This sounds like a great excuse to launch an archive with a bunch of proxies that automatically captures new New York Times articles and tracks changes over an exponential amount of time. Preferably with a built-in algorithm that diffs the articles.
I think many have also been wondering about version control of legislation/law documents for some time as well. But I never understand why it’s not realized yet.
I'm genuinely impressed by this being upvoted here. Big tech and powerful corporate/government interests are destroying our societies. This information needs to be checked and tracked.
I hate to sound like such a darn boot licker, but if NYT doesn’t want Archive crawler on thier domain, what reason can you possibly come up with (legitimately, not based on your feelings) as to why they should have to allow this?
Private business gets to do private business things, nothing to see here other than that tbh.
That reason is moot though, when it’s in thier purview.
I would encourage you to just never click on a New York Times link ever again like the rest of us probably plan on doing. That will speak lpuder than complaints that you can’t access the pay walled content for free anymore (we all know this is the actual reason people here are upset about this notion, let’s just be honest about that).
Honestly as NYT subscriber I really doubt that people actually read NYT through archive or at least most of the archive reader wouldn’t convert anyway. To me it seems like a bad sign of them trying to hide something. Archive is a public way to track website changes which is very valuable for validating journalism.
In general NYT is trying to have their content public and take advantage of indexing but also private for selling subscriptions. It’s a bit of a paradox that really diminishes their position here.
^ This sort of bullshit argument is why we never should’ve stopped requiring a copy of everything to be sent to the Library of Congress in order to earn copyright protection.
Those “private businesses” are treating a privilege granted by Congress as an entitlement. They do not “get” to do that.
If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that the capitalists will get their way one way or another against any attempts at human benevolence or community.
They always do.
I have high hopes for climate change though. It can’t be bribed or coerced into obscurity. I think the capitalists bit off more than they can hide from trying to exploit mother earth for private profit like just another peasant sucker, and unlike us cowering capital batteries, she’s had it with our species’ shit.
This is useful for pointing out if a news site is manipulating a narrative, but for other things, I think news site should get the privacy they need to make stealth edits.
Like:
More recently, the Times stealth-edited an article that originally listed “death” as one of six ways “you can still cancel your federal student loan debt.” Following the edit, the “death” section title was changed to a more opaque heading of “debt won’t carry on.”
This was just poor wording. No reason sites shouldn’t have the peace of mind to change poor wording without being called out.
… What? No, if you need to edit poor wording you add a note establishing that the editor missed a section of poor wording, and that section has been revised.
You want to do stealth edits? We call those first drafts, and they arent published. Want to hide your edit history? Edit before you post.
While I agree in theory, it's hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.
If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn't need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it's annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)
It exists, it’s called a robots.txt file that the developers can put into place, and then bots like the webarchive crawler will ignore the content.
And therein lies the issue: if you place a robots.txt out for the content, all bots will ignore the content, including search engine indexers.
So huge publishers want it both ways, they want to be indexed, but they don’t want the content to be archived.
If the NYT is serious about not wanting to have their content on the webarchive but still want humans to see it, the solution is simple: Put that content behind a login! But the NYT doesn’t want to do that, since then they’ll lose out on the ad revenue of having regular people load their website.
I think in the case of the article here though, the motivation is a bit more nefarious, in that the NYT et al simply don’t want to be held accountable. So there’s a choice to be had for them, either retain the privilege of being regarded as serious journalism, or act like a bunch of hacks that can’t be relied upon.
But how do you determine what’s just ‘fixing poor wording’ and what’s actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?
Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?
Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.
Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It’s really not a path you want to go down.
You don’t and there’s no good way to reconcile my two opinions. I don’t disagree the archive should exist, I’m just saying, manipulating information is a valid reason, but the author’s bullying publishers for mistakes isn’t.
Horseshit. If your editor doesn’t catch the article that says “have the peasants considered suicide as a way out of debt bondage?” then you as a news outlet should absolutely have to live with what you published.
I don’t care how many times you edit your comment, but I also don’t trust you at all. Now, I don’t have to trust you because clearly I am not going to learn anything of value from you.
If you don’t care whether I trust you or not, this shouldn’t bother you.
Most Newspapers trade on their credibility. They should want to be trusted that they aren’t making material changes to their articles. Are you suggesting we leave it to them to decide for themselves what constitutes a material change?
When a news provider publishes something they should be able to be held to what they’ve said. That’s the nature of both publication and the responsibility that the press should be held to
Hot take: We need a middle ground between free unfettered access to journalism and total pay wall restrictions. Physical libraries do this well. Digital content is a lot more complicated. Maybe Internet Archive should only be able to publish content that’s over X years old? Thoughts?
Ok, you’re talking about something entirely different. There could be a way to show edits without giving away the entire content of the article for free. That’s valid.
I love The Internet Archive and throw a few bucks at them every couple months. So much lost media and software is ACTUALLY preserved by them* and this is increasingly important as more and more chuds attack libraries.
But… it is pretty fucked that I can grab every 3ds and ps2 game in existence without seeing a single shitty pop-up and even a decent number of newer games.
Out of print and “disney vaulted” content is a mess. And I understand why, legally, IA might not want to make the distinction. But we already have the solution for in print media that better maps to the actual library model. Buy copies/licenses and use DRM to control the number in circulation. Might have some massive wait queues but that can be solved by “outreach”.
*: As an aside, fuck abandonware sites with a rusty metal pole. Loved how the vast majority went from “It is important to preserve these games you can’t otherwise buy” to “fuck it, upload ALL the gog installers” overnight
DRM at best makes it take more effect to access - a hurdle to entry. In this day and age it has never been easier for regular people to copy, and trying to fight that is an uphill battle in a war they aught to stop anyway.
DRM is a black box of software, doing god-knows-what. That gives them unjust power over users’ computing. DRM manages “rights” by denying people’s software freedoms. DRM is digital restrictions management.
Maybe? We’re talking about a paradigm shift in copyright at a time where it’s harder and harder for traditional journalism to survive. I fear if we take such hardline stances on whether or not this information is freely accessible, we will lose it outright. Propaganda is always free. The truth has costs.
Right, the whole original point of copyright in the US at all was "to promote the creative arts" - that they were finding that if there wasn't at least SOME time for people to try to profit off of stuff they wrote/made, there was way way less motivation for people to put in the effort. It's been twisted a good bit since, but the core idea isn't nonsense, at all.
Same with real journalism. Don't see how people expect it to be done for free. For the past several hundred years it's been normal to pay a modest fee for news.
The middle ground is for them to remove all VC and corporate entities trying to make billions off of journalism while journalists make scraps. We should have federal and state funds that go to journalists and also have a donation model for people to be able to donate easily. Journalism shouldn’t be behind any paywalls though especially in the age if misinformation, deepfakes, etc where all the propaganda and misinformation is freely available and much easier to share
There has been a long fight to get academic papers whose funding sources came from the government to be made open access, with the justification that the people who literally paid for the research should be able to read it. We’re not talking national security here - we’re talking about fruit flies and black holes and such.
The last time I checked, they agreed to make all government funded research open access after (I think) one year. I still think that’s ludicrous, but o see that as being analogous to what is being proposed here.
If we were to check the average number of times the average news article is accessed after publication, I bet it would fall off a cliff after the first couple of days at most. Some might have more staying power, but I bet 90-95% of them basically never get touched again. I’m sure you could take the number of people who buy a subscription on the basis of needing to read a three month old article and figure out a different way to make back the $100/month or whatever they’d lose on just opening access.
Publishers put ridiculous rules in place for digital content. Libraries typically need to pay the full cover price for an ebook and it expires after 1-2 years. So not only can libraries not receive donations of used ebooks like they can physical books, they are also restricted by the limited life span. Sure, physical books experience wear and tear, but that’s built up through use. A less popular book could sit on the shelf for a long time and not degrade substantially, but an ebook could go without being checked out once and it will still expire.
If I’m buying an ebook from a DRM enabled bookstore, there is no reason why I should not be able to sell the book or donate it to a library when I’m done.
All good points. That’s the kind of middle ground I’m talking about. A first sale doctrine for digital. Expiring DRM would be like renting. But if they sell the book to individuals they should sell it to libraries.
The “middle ground” is for publishers to back the fuck off and let libraries do their goddamn jobs.
Why is that position in the middle? Because the extreme position is that the publishers have broken the social contract – which was for Congress to grant them the privilege of a temporary monopoly in exchange for enriching the Public Domain in the long run – and thus no longer deserve to have copyrights at all.
Digital is a completely different paradigm. If an online library has unlimited copies of a book, why would anyone buy it? New books won’t be written is no one pays for them.
Youtube is a pretty good example of where the copywrite striking has gone absolutely bonkers. People have to strike their own videos so ensure that a strike against them won’t just take all of their ad revenue.
I used to make stuff and put it on YouTube, I didn’t monetize it because it was mostly for fun and I didn’t want to annoy people with ads. Anyway, one of my videos had some (very provably) public domain music in it which some bot flagged for copyright infrigement.
YouTube not only immediately sided with the bot, they also turned on monetization on my video without my consent so they could send my non-existent ad revenue to whoever flagged it.
I’ve contested these things before, but it takes ages and there’s nothing to stop another bot from just doing the same thing again immediately anyway, so that was the last straw and I just took everything down and closed my channel.
As a published author, I have to say that yes, indeed, copyright laws have turned corporations into participants in a “copyright industry.” It’s true that a creator’s livelihood relies on people buying their work. It’s also true that a creator’s livelihood depends on the dissemination of their creations. The more you’re in circulation, the better off you will be. Corporate greed and defending the bottom line under copyright law is getting ridiculous. It really puts limits on the scope of a creator’s success. This is why there are creators out there like me who do not mind piracy. When I’m dead, if I wrote something important, I hope future people will be able to see it. I’m pretty sure that whatever I wrote isn’t all that significant, but who knows? Maybe it will be. What I’m getting at: It’s becoming a real problem for documenting the history of human material culture, when you think about it. Corporations are controlling and guarding the human material culture. Their goals work contrary to the goal of the historians and archaeologists of the future. Corporate greed is preventing future people from understanding their past.
I’d add that important or not, it’s great as an artist to know that you’ll touch anyone ! :) It’s not always about history or grand things it’s also about human feelings and spreading any message really !
"John Larkin" by John Larkin only has two copies in existence, one by his widow and the other by an unknown person. If that name seems unfamiliar, it's because he later became more famous as Scatman John.
It was recorded in 1986 but due to current US copyright law, it won't enter public domain until December 3, 2069.
There's a few copies floating around on YouTube and a FLAC version as a torrent.
walledculture.org
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