Satisfy my curiosity

[salinea]

So am I the only one who, when someone casually mentions deleting their old fics or making them unaccessible in any other way has this reaction in her mind :

OH MY GOD YOU EVIL BOOK-BURNING PERSON !!!


I mean, obviously, I doesn't make much sense : we're talking about the authors of those fics. If they're the intellectual owner of that work, they should be perfectly morally allowed to make it unaccessible.

However there's still that thing in the back of my brain that insists : IT'S LIKE BURNING BOOKS ! EVIL ! EVIL ! EVIL !

Am I the only one ?

Comments

[bronze-ribbons.livejournal.com]

To me, it cuts two ways: on the one hand, I feel a writer can edit/delete at will whatever they put on the net. If they feel they've outgrown a work or that it no longer represents how they want to be seen/the impression they want to give new readers, that's their prerogative.

On the other hand, any writer who believes they have full control over their work once it's posted is deluding themselves. For instance, I've deleted hundreds of online diary entries over the years (some because they were unkind to other people, others because they linked to expired memes, and many just because I figured, better to winnow the thing down to 300-odd entries that represent the best of me than leaving 1000+ no one's ever going to wade completely through, much less discover the best ones on their own).

Some people have called that dishonest, but screw that: I believe in editing and finetuning and revision, and I don't pretend that I don't do it. (One reason I'm soooo behind on archiving my fics to Moonshadow and Skyehawke is that I want to be sure I've got the "final" wording correct.)

That said, I know of at least one mirror site, and of people saving stuff to hard drives/printing it out, and LJ quotes entries in comment-notifications, so are there tons of Peg-wordage out there that I have no control over whatsoever? Of course, and that's as it should be. Writers can't control *how* readers interpret their work once it's out there, and those who try to prevent republication/circulation of older stuff (beyond making their opinions known) are to be pitied.

But getting back to fandom: one can't save *everything* to disk, but one sometimes makes a point of it for fics or RP episodes one really loves. Because, aside from authors disavowing earlier work and other emotional/intellectual mayhem, who knows when a server might go kablooey or someone fail to renew a domain or whatever? :-/

[xochiquetzl]

I think of it as being like a Gnu Public License, in a way. You can save it to your hard drive. You can send your friend the link, and she can save it to her hard drive. I don't want people to sell it. I don't want people to put it on their website and say they wrote it. I don't want people to archive it without asking, because I think that archiving is, in a sense, an endorsement. But I think that's common; people pull their fic from archives if the archive makes a policy change they don't like. At the very least, my giving an archive my fic means that I trust them to not disappear or strip my name off and sell it.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeap, you can't stop the signal ^^

My problem is I never save those kind of stuff. I always trust whatever website exists to stay there forever. I save links, and links to page that archive links. But not the stuff itself. How very naice of me ;_;

Thank God for Mirror Site. They're like the advanced alien civilization that records everything on the planet Earth and saves it for historical purpose.