The BBC recently announced that it would be closing down around 200 of its websites, with 172 of them to be deleted from the Internet altogether, in an effort to cut costs. A person who is thought to be identified as Ben Metcalfe opposed this, and paid $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and archive the data across all 172 sites, then shoved them all into a torrent and released it into the digital wild.
From the website where the torrent was released,
The purpose of this project is to show how the entire 172 public facing websites that are earmarked for deletion have been copied, archived, distributed and republished online – independently – for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee (around $3.99).
and why the author felt people should care:
A weaker BBC means a weaker free press and in turn a weaker British democracy and society at large.
The purpose of this project is to expose the ‘cost savings’ of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC and to curry favour with the current government. BBC’s current senior management has demonstrated a lack of leadership and a lack of courage in pushing back on these demands.
Instead, they are prepared to sacrifice a large amount of still useful, marginal-cost content in order to horse trade for concessions elsewhere as they cave in to this pressure.
(via The Next Web)
