I don't think I've ever thought twice about linking to an archive-locked fic on AO3, probably because most of mine are locked due to old e-stalkers. I've seen lots of people link to fics with the share button disabled, too -- they either copy the typical format or flat out say "no share button." I've also seen people link to waybacked fics (and posts, and websites, and whatever) all the time. I remember people linking to their locked fics on LJ comms -- the old "add me and you get access to the fic," &c &c. I have definitely seen people grab fics that were about to be taken down so they could be circulated privately. I don't think I ever thought about any of this in terms of ethics, except Open Doors makes me a little easy because what if the author originally didn't want their fic anywhere but that site? Or they don't want it up anymore and didn't realize it was still there? But there's that prevalent attitude of "you put it on the internet, if you didn't want it available forever you shouldn't have done that, and there's no real way to delete or hide what you publicly posted."
But what Fanlore has been doing really pisses me off, I think because that's mostly personal entries from like 10 years ago that people probably never thought would be read by anyone other than their flist, much less scraped and put up on a wiki. That seems more like what happened with Yahoo Groups when some people got really unhappy their IRL personal info was going to be available (from what I remember), although it wound up on wayback anyway.
no subject
I don't think I've ever thought twice about linking to an archive-locked fic on AO3, probably because most of mine are locked due to old e-stalkers. I've seen lots of people link to fics with the share button disabled, too -- they either copy the typical format or flat out say "no share button." I've also seen people link to waybacked fics (and posts, and websites, and whatever) all the time. I remember people linking to their locked fics on LJ comms -- the old "add me and you get access to the fic," &c &c. I have definitely seen people grab fics that were about to be taken down so they could be circulated privately. I don't think I ever thought about any of this in terms of ethics, except Open Doors makes me a little easy because what if the author originally didn't want their fic anywhere but that site? Or they don't want it up anymore and didn't realize it was still there? But there's that prevalent attitude of "you put it on the internet, if you didn't want it available forever you shouldn't have done that, and there's no real way to delete or hide what you publicly posted."
But what Fanlore has been doing really pisses me off, I think because that's mostly personal entries from like 10 years ago that people probably never thought would be read by anyone other than their flist, much less scraped and put up on a wiki. That seems more like what happened with Yahoo Groups when some people got really unhappy their IRL personal info was going to be available (from what I remember), although it wound up on wayback anyway.