The thing about MySpace's disappearance that we should never forget is that all that media didn't "vanish". It was killed by neglect and incompetence. They had no backups, fucked up a file transfer, and that was that.
The core lesson, that we'd better start learning fast, is that no private corporation, no private collector, no private _anything_ is an effective long-term steward of culture, knowledge, the public trust or the public good, and the whole notion of "intellectual property" isn't just theft, it's also, eventually, arson.
A lot of archive audio and video recordings only survive because someone made unauthorised copies. When the official archives were thrown out, the pirate versions were the only ones left.
Nowadays many official re-issues will say something like "from a private collector's copy" but will never admit that it's a pirated copy.
Copyright is just way too long. If it was back to its original length of 30ish years, we'd have lots of legal archives and fewer works would be lost.
Yup! And to get closer to your original topic, even 30 years is way too long for games and websites.
A completely new look at copyright would be welcome.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anyone in a position of influence interested in preserving works. Large corporations seem quite happy to let their archives rot, some of them even destroy them to make space.
And now it's mainly corporations that fund political campaigns, and well-funded politicians tend to win elections.
They seem to allow it because no one is interested in some of the games at first. So people go to a game download site & certain games start to become popular & all of the sudden they cry the victim. So this site inadvertently ends up promoting certain games by happenstance. Even though the only way Nintendo would know this information was to monitor this download site. So they are using the info from the download site but they are not paying the download site for this info.
a lot of British TV (especially lower budget shows aimed at kids and young people) has been permanently lost because it wasn't archived in the first place, tapes were put through the bulk eraser to be re-used and/or commercial risk from potential repeat fees led to masters being wiped rather than any chance of having to pay these. In other cases legacy format videotapes were left to deteriorate before they could be archived or disposed of in error due to misidentification..
even modern shows from 90s and 00s (well within the timescale that cheap/compact professional videotape formats existed) have not been achived, or in many cases there *are* legal archives but also potential disputes over rights clearance/repeat fees so tapes deteriorate in storage units without being copied to more durable formats, equipment required to play them back becomes obsolete and commercial decisions are quietly made to dispose of the content..
@FediThing That happens with games, too. Nintendo, once up on a time, pirated their own game(s?) so they could sell them back to people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR1uEwjx7VI