Thrifty, Anonymous Benefactor Backs Up BBC Websites Before They Go Dark

revealingheart writes "The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands. The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these 'lost' websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more than $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites."

Comments

Maybe it's different in the UK

[CODiNE]

But in the USA you do something like that you end up in court.

"But your honor, I was only trying to help them."

"Your honor, he has no RIGHT to help us!"

But seriously it would be a great clause in the copyright scheme that if a copyrighted work is taken out of distribution it should automatically go public domain. Otherwise publishers can simply delete history like those old racist Warner Brothers videos they keep taking down from Youtube.