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Jason Scott

9 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read

In 2009, I got laid off from the company that bought the company that bought the company that bought my company. It was a long time coming; each successive firm was looking to cut costs and no cost is cheaper than replacing your long-time employees with not long-term ones.

I didn't want to go from working as a systems administrator to ANOTHER job as a systems administrator while doing the job worse and worse to do what I really loved, which is archiving, history, librarianship, protector of data and stories. I did a kickstarter to get bridge money.

Kickstarter was successful! And I used that money to finish GET LAMP, and then used THAT money to live on while looking for just the right place I could work at. It also afforded me money to go to California at the Personal Digital Archiving Project.

Here's the talk. This was the very first time I walked into the Internet Archive building.

I went into the offices and asked everyone to give me a job there, whatever it could possibly be, and on the second day Brewster said sure. I got to choose a title and my title was Free Range Archivist.

And as of this month, I've been there 10 years.

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More from @textfiles

Jason Scott

@textfiles

9 Mar

You've created, co-produced, hosted, written, and edited a television show about video games. You cover them, the lifestyle of gaming, the joy of them and to give news and opinion on them.

But G4 doesn't exist. eSports is a typo, not an industry.

It's 1994.

You're 12.

Such it is with "Video Games and More", created by J.J. Styles, who hosted 30+ shows during the 1990s, gaining his footing and doing the show at regular intervals throughout the decade.

It helps if you understand Public Access TV in the 1970s-onward in the US. Cable Companies were given a monopoly in towns and counties and part of the negotiation was anyone could apply to have a show on one of the channels on the cable show. There's a massive set of these shows.

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Jason Scott

@textfiles

9 Mar

Everyone keeps seeing me mention some doom or gloom about "copyright law changes" and either go "what is it" or "you're being dramatic".

Nooooo. I'm not.

blog.archive.org/2021/03/09/int…

The new proposed changes/additions have something for everyone, but my personal winner is "notice and staydown", which is going to be a nightmare of proportions beyond belief.

"Notice and Staydown" has been extended out for over a decade. Youtube SORT of does it - they keep an internal list of rough match formulas that say "keep this and anything like it off youtube, or demonetize the content", etc.

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Jason Scott

@textfiles

6 Mar

It was unfair for me to point to the fake-kerfuffle of a suggestion by some dude on twitter that Copyright last 30 years and the resulting melee-of-ignorance that would inevitably cause on all sides as people chewed over the consequences. There's several facts some don't know.

First, copyright has changed in term multiple times over the centuries in the US. Right now, it is Life-of-Creator+70 years or Life-of-Creator+90 years if it's owned by a corporate entity at the end.

This is goddamned ridiculous. If you think it's not you're a coconut.

Quick review. In 1790 it was 14 years. In 1830, that became 28 years. We also added a way for a copyright owner to file for an extension of copyright. We have massive books at the Library of Congress with listings of people/entities who paid for and applied for those.

Read 21 tweets