Guests in my corn: The really big-ass rant against archive-mania
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| Title: | Guests in my corn: The really big-ass rant against archive-mania |
| Creator: | Gwyneth Rhys |
| Date(s): | 1999 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | The X-Files |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Guests in my corn: The really big-ass rant against archive-mania |
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Guests in my corn: The really big-ass rant against archive-mania is an essay by Gwyneth Rhys.
"In which I hold forth on people who think it's okay to take your stuff off your site and put it on theirs without asking, and the utterly bizarre notion some fans have that a link or a rec takes up bandwidth, and they haven't got a clue what that even means."
The post appears to have been made in direct response to the controversy discussed in the post What's With IOHO?.
Excerpts
Recently I was caught in another situation where my stories from this website were downloaded to someone else's website, thereby archiving them on their page, against my stated wishes. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot; other times, a person has asked me, and when I politely declined, they did it anyway. Another person took one of my stories, put her name on it, and tried to put it in an archive.
One of the bad things about this recent situation is that a fair amount of people said I deserved it, because I don't slap warning labels all over my stories. In other words, you didn't tell us no, so it's your fault we stole from you. Someone claimed it's an agreement the fannish community made, and one we must all adhere to. Stories posted to Usenet and e-mail lists were used as example.
First off, I missed that fan Berne Convention where everyone agreed to put warnings against archiving. I've been handling web-based publications for over five years now, and this is just utter hogwash. The net is still in a state of anarchy, but slowly developing its own standards of publishing. And the notion that anyone in the fan "community" could agree to anything is ridiculous; especially when you're talking about splintered fandoms such as X-Files. News flash, kiddies -- fandom has been around for decades longer than the Net, and people are still quibbling over fannish standards from the zine days.
Most importantly, though, none of my stories are posted to Usenet or e-mail lists. They are my stories, archived on my personal website. In other words, it's my place, and you are invited in, but that doesn't mean that whatever's here is yours for the taking. I've designed this site the way I want it to look. I don't like a bunch of warnings and keywords and thank-yous plastered all over the story; I like clean, elegant simplicity. That's simply my preference. It's super-duper easy to click to my home page from any story, if you came to it via a link. In the time it would take someone to load my source code and drag it onto their website, they could be at my home page, where they'd see "Do not archive these stories anywhere else."
In other words, I lock my door when I go to work. If someone breaks in, and they don't see a bunch of sticky notes all over my audio/video and computer equipment saying "do not steal," that doesn't mean they get to steal it. My home page is my locked front door, and it's damn easy to get to that door. There's a little "back to" button at the bottom of each story. I'm sharing my stories with people -- they're free for the download to a hard drive or for a printout; that doesn't mean someone gets to take them to their site to keep in perpetuity, and to archive like I'm in their stable of writers. Geez, I feel like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams: "This is my corn. You guys are guests in my corn."
Another thing I heard was that because torch and Merry Lynne had put recommendations for this particular story on their pages, that they had already archived it, and therefore, I had no right to gripe. This gets at a fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works that is so profound, I don't even know how to begin to set it straight. A link, or a recommendation, is simply a way for someone to move from one site to another. It takes you from MarySue Fan's page to CindyLou Fan's page. That's all. It doesn't mean that MarySue has CindyLou's story on her page. It's just a link -- look it up in the dictionary if you're having trouble with the concept of linking. A recommendation is just a glorified link -- it's when CindyLou Fan loves MarySue's story so much she has to praise it and offer a link so everyone can go there and read it.
I'm so honored and flattered whenever someone wants to link to my stories. It's a good thing. It's not archiving. Archiving is taking someone's stories and putting them on your website (if you both agree to it), using their source code (or yours, if you set it up that way), and keeping it there in perpetuity. If you don't get this, or you're sure this is incorrect, then no one can help you, and you need to get a copy of Internet for Dummies and proceed to beat yourself about the head with it. I have very valid reasons for not wanting my stories archived (and I don't have to explain them to anyone), and my site serves as my personal archive anyway. We should have more links and recs, not less. More recs! Less archives! Yay!