My apologies. I wasn't aware that it was possible to "archive" something without copying it. Silly me. However, the fact that the internet archive copies.. oh sorry.. "archives" data from websites without their permission does not automatically make the act ethical or legal.

Quote:
Unfortunately the internet doesn't work like that.

The ability to look at google cache or the wayback machine for an old version of a website does not define "how the internet works". People may be able to look at history of pages, but the author may still wish that their most recent version is held front and center as the first source, not the second. I'm sure you wouldn't be to keen on having google's result for your homepage be the version from the wayback machine 3 years ago...

This would mean linking to the author's direct source first and only providing an archive upon request if the original source is no longer available. This would be done out of respect for the author's wishes, and the term "respect" sounds a heck of a lot more ethically correct than "I 'archive' what I want!".

Fortunately, the internet that I use does not act the way you describe, and so I still see references 99.9% of the time, not direct copi..er "archives".

- argv[0] on EFnet #mIRC
- "Life is a pointer to an integer without a cast"