Record Productivity and Preserving People's Past on the Net
YESTERDAY, for the first time as far as we can recall, Techrights published more new pages (26) than Tux Machines (25). That included a handful of videos and, it must be noted, some reposted stuff.
We're very productive these days, partly owing to online news slowing down (less time spent if not wasted on curating Daily Links). A lot of what's left on the Web is spam and PR.
26 is far from the most we published in a day, but that number says nothing about volume. Yesterday was busy and rewarding. It'll be the same today.
This in its own right is a notable milestone. Tux Machines will turn 20 in less than 6 weeks. It contains links and excerpts of news articles almost as old as 20 years. It also boasts a gallery of very old GNU/Linux distros - ones over 15 years old! To many of us these are "blasts from the past" and those help us combat revisionism (lies).
"Anyway," an associate has said, "on the topic of patents and copyright" see "Can an Online Library of Classic Video Games Ever be Legal?"
The older page is entitled "The Computer and Video Game Archive relocates".
"Current copyright laws are very harmful in computing," this associate has said, citing another older page ("Librarian combines loves of comics, games").
From 2018 we have a seminal statement ("U. of Mich. video game cache serves as an archive, at play") and from 2021 we have the late announcement ("A new frontier: Preserving computer and video games at the U-M Library The James and Anne Duderstadt Center"). However, it's almost like the university's articles make a point of not mentioning the DMCA.
This cites the "forward-thinking librarian David Carter" and just to be sure, "Dave probably knows about the DMCA," the said has asserted, "but the articles' authors avoid mentioning it."
Poor journalism?
They are in effect trying to preserve history, including memories from many people's childhood. The DMCA turned out to be a terrible mess and Microsoft is eager to exploit this mess.
Our latest batch of Daily Links ("Malaysian and Russian Governments Crack Down on Journalists") shows that censorship online is a growing problem. DMCA is just a very ripe-for-exploitation tool and the above story serves to highlight what's at stake. Europe has this issue too and RSF says that the US fell to 45th last year (on a global scale, US is sandwiched between Gambia and Tonga). For comparison, the UK is ranked 26th and 90% of the top ten (or all top 9) are European countries. █