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Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

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Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#41

Post by mavhc »

13of40 wrote: post #36
jefftk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The respectful thing to do is to permanently erase the previous owners files without reading them. We're not talking about accidentally getting someone's old hard drive: this is a public-facing website, the kind of thing people generally create because they want the public to be able to read what they've written.

It's not even that. When you buy a domain, it's not like you get control of the content it used to point to as well. There's nothing for OP to delete.

can be if they used that domain as an email address to log into things

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#42

Post by peckrob »

To me it's analogous to buying a house. If you buy a house over a certain age, especially one that's changed hands several times, there's a pretty fair chance someone died in it. You can either stress yourself out over that and walk away, or accept that that's just part of life and move on with things.

Last year I helped my best friend clean out his mom's condo after she passed away unexpectedly. Aside from a few sentimental items he kept and some things that were valuable either as gifts to the remaining family, for donations, or for or resale, the very very vast majority of the accumulated stuff went straight into the dumpster. A lifetime worth of things were cleaned out in two days and the condo was sold within a week.

Nothing in our lives is truly permanent and the only constant is change. Accepting that change is part of being human.

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#43

Post by creeble »

The past use of a domain can haunt you for a while, depending on what that past use was.

For example, I knew someone who bought a domain (from a 3rd-party domain seller) whose more recent past had included adult content (you would never know from the name itself). After they set the website / email up, they discovered that their domain was on a lot of blacklists, and had mucho mail delivery problems. It took over 2 years to get through it all.

This doesn't sound like it would have that particular problem, but the domain's history can, in fact, haunt you. If the content it previously hosted could ever be considered as something that might be blacklisted by the big "blacklist cartels" (i.e., SpamHaus et al), be forewarned.

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#44

Post by bloak »

bloak wrote: post #14

I'm not suggesting you'd want to do this, but (theoretical question) is it still possible for the new owner of a domain to get web.archive.org to delete the archived data from that domain, the data created by a previous owner? I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example: https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...

I'm not sure why this is getting voted down. It seems relevant to me that archive.org used to believe, and perhaps still does believe, that the archived history of a domain should be under the control of the current owner of the domain.

An alternative might be to delete history only when someone fills in a form claiming to own some copyright. BUT ... what about the situation in which your web server is temporarily taken over by a hacker and the hacked contents gets archived before you can restore the web site? In that situation it would perhaps seem reasonable for the owner of the domain to get the bogus content removed from the archive even without owning any copyright.

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#45

Post by jonnycomputer »

I think it doesn't matter. At the same time...

So once a friend of mine worked at a good will store sorting through donations. And they found a treasure trove of family albums. The person making the donation said that it was from a tenant of theirs who was kicked out or lost the apartment. Anyway, I took the photos and forgot about it. Then when I was digging through the storage, I found them, and decided, what the heck, I'd try to figure out who these belonged to. So I studied all the photos in the albums, and some clippings and receipts, and with a little leg work, figured out who it was, looked them up, and gave them a call, asking if they want their photos back.

They were pretty openly hostile to the inquiry. So I backed off, and threw the albums in the garbage. So, that was that. Maybe I approached the phone call wrong. Or maybe they really didn't want it, or to be bothered. You never know.

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#46

Post by Hard_Space »

inportb wrote: post #27
Hard_Space wrote: post #13

If you feel conflicted, you could host the original pages in a dedicated directory with a no-index header, and set up a permanent 301 redirect for those pages..? If they end up listed with your own results, it's trivial to get Google to remove them via Search Console (I do this occasionally for my pure HTML website, which has no Google Analytics etc. on it). That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it fr…

That's a good idea. Or, since it's already archived, redirect to the archived copy.

Yes, that's probably a better solution.

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#47

Post by vitovito »

peckrob wrote: post #42

To me it's analogous to buying a house. If you buy a house over a certain age, especially one that's changed hands several times, there's a pretty fair chance someone died in it. You can either stress yourself out over that and walk away, or accept that that's just part of life and move on with things. Last year I helped my best friend clean out his mom's condo after she passed away unexpectedly. Aside from a few sen…

I think the house analogy is a good one. You should buy the domain and use it, that's how they work, just like houses, but you can also be intentional about being clear that there were people there before you. Establishing redirects to archived versions of the URLs is one.

I recently sold a previously personal domain to a company that was going to use it for a new product. I added contractual provisions to address some of the issues that would come up, and I experimented with explicitly archiving a marker file to leave a record in web archives that the domain had changed hands, and a human being could consider treating the site as having different owners (and thus different archival permissions) before and after that point in time.

I wrote up my findings here: http://vitor.io/archival-markers and the proposed "/.well-known/archival-ownership-markers/ resource prefix" is described there along with examples.

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#48

Post by number6 »

zvr wrote: post #24
number6 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the site [0] it can not be re-used. [0] http://www.isbn.org/faqs_general_questions And yes... this is the official agency for ISBN in the US; the International ISBN page only looks a little less scammy: https://www.isbn-international.org/ . Maybe they care more about analog media than digital...

This is not exactly what the page says. It says nothing about them be free to give the same ISBN to someone else. Typical case: a publisher gets hundreds of ISBNs in bulk. At some point they close their business. The agency can give the unused numbers to someone else. Determining which were unused is not always easy, since there is no requirement to inform them when one is assigned to a book -- therefore mistakes are…

In the end it's just some number on a book, but in an ideal world a ISBN is not reused and only assigned to one book.

What can be done when a book is printed with the wrong ISBN?

A new, unused ISBN must be assigned to the book, stickers or labels made and placed on the books, and all industry databases updated with the new, correct ISBN

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#49

Post by [deleted] »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #45

I think it doesn't matter. At the same time... So once a friend of mine worked at a good will store sorting through donations. And they found a treasure trove of family albums. The person making the donation said that it was from a tenant of theirs who was kicked out or lost the apartment. Anyway, I took the photos and forgot about it. Then when I was digging through the storage, I found them, and decided, what the h…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

#50

Post by toomuchtodo »

Ask someone from ArchiveTeam to run ArchiveBot against the site, the resulting WARC will eventually make its way into the Wayback Machine. After that, feel free to use the domain for your own purposes.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page

archiveteam@archiveteam.org or IRC at the channel #archiveteam (on hackint)

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