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Comment by wise_young_man | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Twitpic a free service? You would pay for a storage locker right? Museums charge money.

This stuff isn't free to maintain.

A free storage locker couldn't chuck my stuff in the trash either. TwitPic didn't ask anyone to pay to keep their data. They just decided to delete it. And museums don't charge the artist for upkeep.

If I had a friend tell me that his free storage locker chucked his stuff, I'd tell him thats what he gets for using a free storage locker.

And you would be wrong, because no one deserves to have their stuff chucked and it's actually illegal. Your friend has recourse in that situation.

So say TwitPic literally had no money to keep the servers running that housed your data, what then? Tell them to suck it and all get new jobs to support your data? Or give you a grace period to reclaim that data?

Number 2 sounds like a completely reasonable approach.

So they ran out of money suddenly? With no warning, they discover they have only 10 days to survive? They should still work with archivists to offload the data.

They could at least turn off new registrations, and put some kind of notice on the home page that they're about to shut down. TwitPic is still accepting new signups and uploads.

I don't know but what if they did? You offer no alternative other than saying it should be illegal, what if a service actually did run out of money immediately? Throw them in jail because their servers got repossessed by the bank?

If a storage company went under and gave everyone notice to pick up their old shit and after the deadline there were still unclaimed items, what are they supposed to do?

I would sue a storage company and the owners personally that destroyed my possessions without giving me enough time to go get them. 10 days is not enough time. 100 days might not be enough time. The amount of time should be decided by someone, like the state in which the company resides

This exact outcome (running out of money and shutting down) was foreseeable from day 1. They should have had a plan in place beyond pretending it wasn't going to happen until it was too late.

The company has no money, what are you going to sue them for? If they're properly incorporated you wouldn't be able to go after the owners.

You can break the corporate veil when execs break the law.

Except that's never the case, the silicon valley wage fixing scandal was hugely illegal and they got fined/class action lawsuit. No criminal charges.

Donate the data to a 3rd party company. It's not that hard.

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