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Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It (fusion.net)

Posted by msmash on from the what's-happening dept.

Ethan Chiel, writing for Fusion: Artist Dennis Cooper has a big problem on his hands: Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared. It's gone because it was kept entirely on his blog, which the experimental author and artist has maintained on the Google-owned platform Blogger since 2002 (Google bought the service in 2003). At the end of June, Cooper says he discovered he could no longer access his Blogger account and that his blog had been taken offline. Along with his blog, Google disabled Cooper's email address, through which most of his correspondence was conducted, he told me via Facebook message. He got no communication from Google about why it decided to kill his email address and blog. Cooper used the blog to post his fiction, research, and visual art, and as Artforum explains, it was also "a platform through which he engaged almost daily with a community of followers and fellow artists." His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog, but they are only screenshots. Google Cache is also of not much help. Slashdot readers, just out of curiosity, is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

17 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. The Cloud Is Wonderful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    until the lightning bolt comes out of it....

  2. Save often, make backups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I mean...really? It's 2016. Your art is your passion, and you don't have it backed up ANYWHERE?

    1. Re:Save often, make backups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

      Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

      Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

    2. Re:Save often, make backups by St.Creed · · Score: 5, Funny

      Creating backups is soooooo last millenium... it's all in the cloud now and these "big data" NoSQL solutions are failsafe. Or failproof. Or whatever. The data is not lost, it's just missing in action - it may even show up one day all by itself.

      --
      Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
    3. Re:Save often, make backups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

      Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

      Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

      Did you ever work in retail at any time in your life? One of the first things it teaches you is that there is an entire class of people who absolutely HATE lifting a finger to do anything at all for themselves, no matter how easy that thing may be, no matter how much sense it might make. They resent the notion of ever having to take care of their own affairs.

      It's sort of like the people who wait on hold for 30-45 minutes for tech support, only to ask a question that's answered in the manual, in the FAQ, in the help file, on the web site, and often, what they need is right there in the menu if only they'd click on it just to see what it contains. Plus, the people who really do need a technician (say, because the problem is on the ISP's end) get to wait extra long because of the backlog of useless people.

      I don't know what the percentage of them is, but a lot of people are just helpless. Entire industries play a role in helping them remain that way. The only thing left is for restaurants to offer them pre-chewed food.

    4. Re:Save often, make backups by Prien715 · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" ~ Linus Torvalds

      --
      -- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
    5. Re:Save often, make backups by hey! · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    6. Re:Save often, make backups by Reaperducer · · Score: 5, Informative

      He was probably counting on Google, as the service provider, to backup his data for him. The way that (if you let it) Apple backs up all of your iPhone data constantly so that if you drop it in the toilet, you just get a new iPhone and everything in a few hours magically comes back the way you left it.

      That's the promise of "the cloud" we keep hearing about from the marketing departments. This artist, being an artist not a tech guy, believed it.

      But this is actually par for the course for Google. I moved all of my clients off of Blogger about five years ago after one of their Blogger blogs simply disappeared without a trace and no recourse. After a little digging, I turned up HUNDREDS of similar cases of people's Blogger accounts vanishing into thin air with zero help from Google. This has been going on for years, and Google is silent about it.

      After all, you get what you pay for.

      --
      -- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
  3. Re:Backups by Nkwe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you dont have a backup, then it must not have been important to you...

    Actually, if you haven't successfully tested a restore of your backup, you don't have a backup (and it must not be that important to you.)

  4. "... consider suing ..." by Splat · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Cooper, who lives in France, told Artforum he’s consulted a French lawyer specializing in intellectual property. He told me he’s considering suing Google"

    Blogger TOS:

    "OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”."

    Oh would you look at that ...

  5. Re:Free by apoc.famine · · Score: 5, Funny

    Millenials, I think.

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  6. archive.is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://archive.is/3tNs

  7. Re:Free by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Where does all this hate for millenials comes from?

    Gen Xer's who are stuck between the Baby Boomers who got everything and the millennials who whine about everything.

  8. Try Resurrect Pages plugin by Solandri · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'll join the chorus of voices saying it was incredibly stupid to use an online service as your only copy of your materials, with no local backup. But what's done is done. If the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy, try installing the Resurrect Pages add-on to Firefox. It links to a lot more caching and archiving services than just the Wayback Machine.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/

  9. Get off my lawn! by mattyj · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is just a case of someone that doesn't know how the Internet works, and maybe can't read. It's documented elsewhere that his account was disabled because of a violation of Google's terms, and when that happens, after you try to log into google there's a prominent message saying as much with instructions on how to get more info, etc.

    Nothing has been deleted. Nothing is gone. He just needs to take care of whatever violation he triggered with Google.

    And, as stated elsewhere by everybody and their mothers, back your stuff up someplace else in the physical world. Hard to believe it took this guy 63 years to learn that lesson.

  10. No backup, artist must consider it unimportant too by drnb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.

    Important enough to back up?

    The artist's "experiment" has made a "discovery". Its important to back up your data regardless of who your online storage "partner" is.

  11. No, this has nothing to do with Google. by thesupraman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let me tell you a story..

    An experimental artist did some work, pinned it up to the public noticeboard at the load library.
    He notice some people looking at it, so made more, kept pinning it up. Never kept any copies, just pinned the originals up.
    The noticeboard had plenty of empty space, and he was enjoying this.
    Some people even pinned up notes making comments on his work
    After a few years, the noticeboard was taken down, because the library had been been reorganising, and there were now bookshelves there.

    The artist stood in front of the library, complaining to everyone who walked past 'they took down my artwork!!! its not fair!!'

    Perhaps he should have gone to librarian and asked very nicely if they still had the old noticeboard content, because he had been foolish enough to
    not keep any copies, and would really like to actually have kept some of it.

    But no, he just kept complaining to random passers by, hoping that would somehow help.