>>7
Like when mp3.com was taken over in 2003, and several gigs of songs were erased outright rather than stored on a tape or something? That's plenty of culture — not-commercialised culture at that — straight down the drain. And our digital age sees to it that we can never get back the content inventory, much less the content itself.
(I'm stressing the non-commercial part cos the corporations can take care of themselves. Stuff that's been released on CDs can be copied (back?) to harddisk. Stuff on a single disk, that nobody knows about, gets lost easily.)
And that's just one site.
And the fact that it's standard procedure, doesn't really excuse the behaviour. Burning heretics and witches at the stake, was standard practice once.