[bell-cot]

Sure sounds like, this time, Betteridge is wrong and the answer is "yes". If so...well, it was both legal and cheap, and plenty of people with money would have had good (as in "self-serving") reason to do it.

Sadly - but predictably - the Washington Post story ends with "whoever did this horrible thing had a good lawyer, and covered their tracks well". Zero hint that anything could actually be done to guard against more such bad things happening. Let alone that anyone should get off their "click headline, read story, get angry, repeat" butt and try to do something.

Pro Tip: If you're selling / downsizing / closing a web site that's full of important information (for history, public interest, etc.), then you should consider donating it to a library with the resources to keep it on-line. Or at least keeping a copy, and put in a clause into the sale contract about free & easy public access having to continue. Or any public library being allowed to also host it, free, if they chose to do so.

[matthewdgreen]

The Washington Post story lists several theories and puts the spotlight in a bad thing that may have happened here. Hopefully that will inspire other investigators to keep digging. Newspaper reporters are not given infinite resources to chase stories.

If you want to get off your butt I’m sure you could probably contribute to the investigation yourself. It seems very amenable to volunteer “OSINT” type of research from dedicated volunteers.

[bell-cot]

Sounds like we have rather different philosophies about "try to do something".

Once it is established that the takedown was either completely legal, or very easily could have been - then my attitude is that spending further resources on a "takedown whodunnit" investigation is about like tracking an escaped horse from the open barn door to the highway, where it was hit and killed by a truck. Beyond a little story to tell, you probably won't have much to show for the effort.

My notion of "doing something" is more about closing the damned barn door, before more horses get out. The Washington Post would need ~zero reporter resources to clearly make that point. Maybe throw in a kudo to some lawmaker who's trying to help on that front, or some old-newspaper-story preservation effort.

[matthewdgreen]

I'm not exactly sure what you're proposing to do here. This case involves a private media archive being sold to a private buyer, with said private buyer (potentially) using the purchase to suppress older reporting. An obvious immediate fix would be to eliminate the incentives that drive this behavior, i.e., ensure that the Streisand Effect makes this approach worthless.

Specifically: if this buyer is attempting to "catch and kill" stories by purchasing and destroying the archive, then a good fix is to ensure that there is new reporting that undermines the purchaser's goal and actually drives more attention to their activities. Indeed, far from being something to complain about, this Washington Post story seems like the first step in achieving exactly that goal. It now needs to be followed up by further investigation that identifies the specific individual(s) at issue so they can be explicitly named and shamed.

Your alternative approach is what exactly? Clearly you're correct that posting the archives to a public library would have been better. But I'm not sure how to force for-profit publishers to do this in the past (impossible) or even in the future.