Removing Violet Blue from Boing Boing is compatible with Free Culture

There’s been a lot of hoopla these days on Xeni Jardin’s decision to remove several (if not all of the) posts referencing blogger Violet Blue on Boing Boing.

People have been raising a regular ruckus, especially considering BB’s long track record supporting free culture, and have been accusing BB of censorship, revising history, and in general being very hypocritical.

There’s been a veritable tornado, just check out the comments on That Violent Blue thing, you’ll see me down around number 1788 and 1790. As usual, I ended up writing long, post-worthy, comments. But technically I don’t have the time right now to do this, so I’ll just copy and paste my responses:

It’s sad that this has blown up so much.

BB has always been vocally supportive of open and free culture. Removing posts from BB itself doesn’t conflict with that, as it is their right as owners of the site to control what copies of their posts are available here.

Xeni’s example of her father burning his own paintings maps well onto this situation. From what I understand, he destroyed works that he had created but never released into society at large, and so there was no attack on culture. And in the case that those paintings had been published publicly, he still has the right to destroy his own personal copies.

The only “wrong thing” he could have done would be to publish his works into public consumption, thereby making them a part of our culture, then go out later and destroy every copy that existed. Without *all* of those circumstances, he’s in the clear, in my mind, from a “Free Culture” standpoint.

Now for this controversy, we have a collection of works (posts) that are published online at BB for the public at large, and have without question become a part of our culture. Now, if these works existed only on BB’s servers, and they deleted them, that would wrong as it would be destroying every copy that existed.

But if you actually read BB, you’ll know that the nature of the Internet doesn’t allow for things to disappear. Cory’s been chanting it for years: “There is no future in which bits become harder to copy.” There are copies of BB everywhere, in fact, it would be near impossible to do the “wrong thing” and destroy every copy to wipe it from our cultural log.

Hell, even traditional newspaper’s couldn’t easily “unpublish” something, unless they could recall every newspaper they printed. Arguing that they’re “the public record” is moot point, because they couldn’t unpublish even if they wanted to. The “public record” argument was more valid 200 years ago, when a publisher had a more reasonable chance of destroying every copy that existed of their work.

People are only confused (and then angry) because they can’t separate the BB server from the BB content. The BB server contains but one visible copy of each post, the original copy to be sure, but just one copy.

If someone destroyed the Declaration of Independence, it’d have no effect on future generations benefiting from its text. Sure, symbolically, it’d be a big loss, but it’s not like then all of the other copies would “unpublish”.
The only metrics that matter form a positive relationship: how many people are influenced by it and how many copies are available.

The more people that are influenced by a work, the more important that all of the copies aren’t destroyed. As the internet quickly and efficiently copies popular works everywhere, the less it matters that any one copy is destroyed.

BB could pull the plug on their site right now, and we’d still have copies of everything available.

And then, in response to comment 1789, which argues for stronger considerations to be made for original sources (over the multitude of copies):

As I said, if the original Declaration of Independence was destroyed, it’d be a symbolic loss, but it wouldn’t affect the availability of it’s cultural impact on future generations.

Sure, when the main source of a work destroys their original copy, it can make finding the work inconvenient, and can be very upsetting, but in this day and age, it’s really hard to get rid of something that’s popular.

I too, am upset that they’d remove their original copies, and I agree that they could have handled the disclosure much better.

I am also regularly neurotic with worry about the loss of culture. I’m native Hawaiian and fully mourn the loss of cultural information that occurred when the Missionaries came (both by the Missionaries and the Hawaiians themselves who had predicted the the coming of a “superior” culture and had gone about dismantling their own).

But the loss on the BB server did not destroy the BB works. A real “unpublishing” of something with a strong cultural/historical influence that is available online is nigh impossible.

The only real way, at this point, of removing something from wide circulation would be to destroy the infrastructure that supported that circulation.

To destroy the work completely would mean not only the network, but all of the mirrors, caches, hard copies, etc.

I think then that we’ve more to fear from those electronic munching crazy rasberry ants than from Xeni’s editorial decisions.

At this point, I don’t plan on following the thread on BB further, but I’ll gladly respond to comments here.