This was posted to my forums and I thought it was an important enough topic to deserve more attention:
What is this communities (sic) opinion on saving and potentially rehosting (breaking copyright) of RPG blogs, posts, etc. in the potential event of that contents host going down?
Morally, the difference is for what purpose you rehost stuff. The great thing about archive.org is that it has a clear purpose of preservation. If someone does it on their homepage where they also sell other stuff, the purpose might be to increase traffic and sales, so the purpose becomes murky.
I mentioned archive.org on my reply in the forum. I’ve never tried saving something to the archive. Does it handle threaded forum style discussions well? That might be one complication for saving at least some sorts of things.
I’m not sure what you expect when you ask " Does it handle threaded forum style discussions well?".
Luckily, it’s really simple. It took me less than a minute to save this:
This was more to the effect of how to capture a thread that was (by the point the forums were defunct) several dozen pages long.
Yes, this is where some of the moral implications come in, because there is potentially profit motive if I’m selling a game system book, but I link to articles for inspiration appendix N style.
judge on a case by case bassis
Beware it can blow up on you.
Tricky, because some people take down blogs because they no longer want anything to do with it. Are you going to resurrect things against their will? What about dead people? What about their relatives? All of that before we’re getting into copyright and profits (for which I have much less regard).
I think once you publish, the cat’s out of the bag. You can take it down on your end but I don’t know id there’s some right to force others to destroy it too. I think the digital world twists this a bit but, in an analog sense, if I clip something out of a magazine article and, some time later, the author retracts it. That had no authority on me if I want to reference it in an article that I write.
