In the UK, if you publish a book, magazine or newspaper, by law you have to send a copy to the British Library for archive. A lot of other countries have similar laws. In the UK, legal deposit has expanded to include the web (so long as the person/group creating the content is in the UK), but since many individuals and small businesses are unaware of legal deposit, the UK Web Archive will archive a lot of the web by themselves.
Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving:
> The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important.
He also added his own thoughts:
> I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future.
I'm sure it's "useful" for historians and archeologists. But it's fundamentally problematic.. like unwrapping mummies, it's fundamentally disrespecting people's wishes and exerting your will over other people's labor.
Trying to see the limits of this logic. Would you say that if you paint a painting , you should have no right to shred it ?
Text is just trivial to copy perfectly and doesn't have the intrinsic protection of other mediums
If things were archived in a artic vault to be opened in 1000 years maybe I'd respect the arguments for archiving better
Current "archiving" is steal and rehosting other people's work/labor
Tom Scott interviewed some people from the British Library, and they explain the importance of archiving:
> The importance of legal deposit not being selective, and being everything, is: we can't decide today what's going to be important in 50 years' time. We want everything, because we don't know what will be important.
He also added his own thoughts:
> I cannot overstate just how useful it is to be able to track down things that never made it online, or to research out of print, forgotten books where there are no other copies available, or to scan through every issue of an obscure local newspaper to track down one reference. This is the raw text of history, as it happened, and someone has to keep it preserved for the future.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNVuIU6UUiM