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SoundCloud Halts Volunteer Archiving Project (vice.com)
Slashdot reader nielo tipped us off to more SoundCloud news. Motherboard reports:
Last week, a group of volunteer digital preservationists known as The Archive Team announced they would be attempting to independently archive a 123.6 million track, 900-terabyte swath of SoundCloud, the popular streaming music and audio service that recently announced mass layoffs and office closures, sparking fears of an imminent closure. But just as the volunteer archive of SoundCloud was due to be getting started, it's been abruptly called off at the behest of the company... I reached out to SoundCloud for more information, and a spokesperson responded with the following written statement: "SoundCloud is dedicated to protecting the rights and content of the creators who share their work on SoundCloud. We requested the Archive Team halt their efforts as any action to take content from SoundCloud violates our Terms of Use and infringes on our users' rights... SoundCloud is not going away -- not in 50 days, not in 80 days or anytime in the foreseeable future..." But that hasn't stopped some individuals on Reddit's r/datahoarder subreddit from attempting to gather their own personal archives of as much of SoundCloud as they want and can afford to host.
Stealing my ideas and claiming them as your own is also an affront to my humanity.
...so...90 days then, thanks for the heads up
the death spiral has begun
Please read the second discussion I linked to. It's not about a random person freeloading on that Bieber video, it's about putting massive barriers to creating new works and to transmitting culture.
Being content that you can live, eat and copulate is what animals do. It's important, yeah, but for me "humanity" means things what make us different from non-human animals, and most of that difference can be called "culture". Copyright is the current biggest obstacle to creation and transmission of culture, ergo, it is a crime against humanity.
Murdering a person destroys the animal part. Burning a book destroys the cultural part. Both parts matter. And while a single human is (usually) worth more than a single book, it's almost never a single book that gets burned.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I think there's a fair middle ground here. A short-term copyright, say about 20 years, should be enough for creators to come up with ideas and profiting from them, while still promoting the sciences and arts in the long-term.
Oh, will you look at that. The original length of copyright was just 14 years. Gradually, over the centuries, it's been bastardized to the current ridiculous life plus 70-120 years. Can you imagine if we had to pay for other things for that long? We'd still be paying the progeny of the people who worked on building the Brooklyn Bridge.
Scale copyright's duration back down to about 20 years (or hell, even 40 years - average length of a career), and most of these problems disappear on their own. Yes you should get credit for and be able to profit from thinking up clever ideas. No you and your progeny should not be able to extract a toll from society in perpetuity for using the idea.