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by piker 3072 days ago
>> FLP also proposed to upload litigation materials to IA in only machine-readable formats compressed into enormous multi-gigabyte tarballs, ending the human-readable individual HTML files that have for years made it easy for normal users with standard web browsers to see court records.

Perhaps the "only" is telling here. Were they previously also uploading the tarballs? No wholesale user would want to scrape the thousands of extra pages of HTML to download the content. So if they weren't already uploading the tarballs, this is actually a beneficial change.

1 comments

Previously FLP was uploading files that users can read with a web browser -- HTML, PDF, and also XML with metadata. I could and did link directly to HTML and PDFs, including circulating these materials with coauthors and research assistants and members of the press.

If FLP begins uploading only huge tarballs, and not the individual constituent files, I won't be able to do any of that.