03-10-2021, 11:35 AM
Those rules are not in place purely to ensure that the original ripper gets credit for their efforts (though that is certainly part of it). In many cases, sheets were submitted to one particular site instead of another and allowing mass uploads from other sites would effectively be condoning theft of their content. Think about it - if Sprites Inc does come back up and you were to grab everything from it and submit it here, you'd be driving traffic away from another site that may well stick around. In the past, we've worked with other sites who were shutting down and specifically authorized all of their content to be transferred over to us and in special cases like that, we typically handle the uploads ourselves (though if there's a ton of content, we may indeed ask for help).
In the case of Sprites Inc specifically, I've reached out to them multiple times offering to host them (i.e. the entire site, not just their content) outright but so far, they haven't seemed interested in doing so.
I guess to sum it up, I understand and appreciate where you're coming from but these rules are in place for more reasons than you're aware of and will not be removed in any general sense. I'm all for preservation and archival but it needs to be done right since, as you point out, sites like ours already operate in a gray area given that most of the artists are not consulted directly before their work is uploaded. Perhaps with this recent outage for them, they'll revisit either my original hosting offer or would consider transferring their content if they don't want to continue operating and if that happens, we can discuss the best way to move over content.
In the case of Sprites Inc specifically, I've reached out to them multiple times offering to host them (i.e. the entire site, not just their content) outright but so far, they haven't seemed interested in doing so.
I guess to sum it up, I understand and appreciate where you're coming from but these rules are in place for more reasons than you're aware of and will not be removed in any general sense. I'm all for preservation and archival but it needs to be done right since, as you point out, sites like ours already operate in a gray area given that most of the artists are not consulted directly before their work is uploaded. Perhaps with this recent outage for them, they'll revisit either my original hosting offer or would consider transferring their content if they don't want to continue operating and if that happens, we can discuss the best way to move over content.