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The (very early!) post Most interesting mathematics mistake? recently came back to the front page, and I noticed that the excellent answer by @DanielMoskovich includes images sourced from Elwes's blog and MathWorld. I know that we've previously had situations where images were lost; I seem to remember that Thurston had posted many beautiful images as part of his answers, and they were lost when the page where they had originally been posted was taken down.

Is it worth editing this and other posts to ‘future-proof’ (hopefully!) by uploading the same images to Imgur i.sstatic.net (thanks to @MartinSleziak for clarification)? Would this be regarded as inappropriate, for copyright or other reasons? If so, is there any solution beyond simply hoping that the original images stay up? (I'd upload to the Wayback Machine, but I believe that they are not currently accepting uploads.)

EDIT: Thanks again to @MartinSleziak for digging up a few related posts on Meta.SE: Is it ok to save and re-upload images in questions? and Should I change image links from private sites to imgur. On the latter, Jeff Atwood said (in 2011) that there was a solution in the works that might, in the future, do this automatically. For want of this, it seems that the closest thing to an answer is avpaderno's, which says "I don't see anything wrong with editing the post to show the same picture hosted on i.sstatic.net." However, @MartinSleziak pointed out in chat that the MO consensus may be different. Is this sort of editing also appropriate on MO?

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Content hosted elsewhere does not become available under the CC-BY-SA licence when used in a MO post (even though the browser helpfully displays the image for you embedded in the post, the post as such actually only contains a link to the image). You cannot just take an image hosted elsewhere and repost it on i.sstatic.net unless you are the copyright holder (which may or may not be the user who originally posted it here). This precludes any automated solution, or even any manual mass reposting of such images by other users than from whom the images originated.

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    $\begingroup$ Are you sure that this is an accurate representation of the legal situation? Jeff Atwood said that StackExchange was looking at a way to automatically "mirror images across the entire network", and, though I don't know exactly what that means, it sounds to me like re-uploading images on non-SE controlled servers to ones on SE-controlled servers. Although they seem not actually to have done this, it seems like they wouldn't even have planned on mass potential violation of licenses. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 30 at 13:23
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    $\begingroup$ "Looking at" does not actually imply anything, and as you can see, none of this actually materialized, which might tell you something about its feasibility. You seem to be inferring way too much from an informal suggestion made 13 years ago by someone who has hasn't been with the company for almost as long. Also, Jeff Atwood seem not to take copyright law very seriously. If you remember the relicencing mess a few years ago, well, that actually started with his decision years ago to unilaterally relicense all SE content from version 2 of the licence to v. 3. Nobody was inclined to complain... $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Oct 30 at 13:38
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    $\begingroup$ ... about it at the time, but it was recognized as illegal later when the relicencing to v. 4 happened. $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Oct 30 at 13:39
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    $\begingroup$ OK. Do you know how this relate to the legality or not of things like the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive, where pages can be uploaded and archived with even less pretext than we would have here? $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 30 at 13:48
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    $\begingroup$ I also do ask if you are sure that there is no explicit or implicit licensing? The language at stackoverflow.com/help/licensing refers to "all publicly accessible user contributions" being licensed under some flavour of CC BY-SA. This does not, to me, clearly distinguish between whether those contributions are typed directly into the text box, or simply linked, as long as they are publicly accessible; but I can imagine laws, court decisions, or even just norms (or definitions of ‘contributions’) that clarify this—I just don't know of any (because I haven't looked). $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 30 at 14:00
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    $\begingroup$ "User contribution" most certainly does not apply to images that can be linked literally from anywhere on the internet. Just like it does not apply to e.g. all the links to published papers. This would be simply absurd. The "user contribution" in that is not more than the text of the link URL; not anything at the destination of the link. $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Oct 30 at 14:04
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    $\begingroup$ The reason I'm asking about definitions is, certainly, a user could link something that they didn't mean to, or don't have the right to, re-license. But they could also enter something in the answer box that they didn't mean to, or don't have the right to, re-license (for example, by copying someone else's text). The answer box makes it easy for someone to upload an image, and, if they do so, even if they didn't have the right to do so, then presumably SE doesn't go on a fact-finding mission themselves to find out if the user had a right to submit it; they just treat it as licensed to them. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 31 at 10:37
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    $\begingroup$ It is clear that there is, or may be imputed to be, a difference of user intent between linking to an image and uploading it, but it is not clear to me that it should meaningfully impact SE's rights to content if a user links to something they don't have the right to, versus uploading something that they don't have the right to. In such cases, not necessarily your intuition or mine, but usually the law, decides what is legal. (Hopefully, but not always, informed by some deference to what is sensible or absurd!) That is why I ask about relevant laws, court decisions, norms, or definitions. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 31 at 10:38
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    $\begingroup$ I’m sorry, but I can’t make much sense of your reasoning. It is perfectly legal to link to anything, whether you have any rights to it or not. Otherwise no internet could exist. It is not legal to post content (whether it’s text or images) whose rights you do not own to a website like the Stackexchange network. This is the core principle of copyright law. People can, and frequently do, post links to images owned and hosted by third parties. It is not legal to copy such images elsewhere, such as to an SE hosted site. It’s one thing if this happens in isolated cases by accident; this ... $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Oct 31 at 10:58
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    $\begingroup$ ... cannot be reasonably prevented. It’s a completely different thing to do this willfully en masse. $\endgroup$
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Commented Oct 31 at 11:00
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    $\begingroup$ I think you're saying something not entirely unlike (my sloppy paraphrase) that it's probably not too bad (from a liability perspective) if SE is mislicensing some material, as long as there's some sort of reasonable presumption of good faith that it's not intentional. I believe that is consistent with an answer I got in chat from another user about how the Internet Archive can operate (a question I asked above). Thank you for sharing your reasoning. $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 31 at 12:14
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    $\begingroup$ I should probably have said "safe harbor" somewhere in my previous comment. (Incidentally, while it is intuitively obvious, the legality of linking arbitrarily is, as you doubtless know, itself something that had to be litigated. The decisions were, I believe, mostly in favour of the sensible vision you propound, but I think that's only evident in hindsight in a society where the internet is now so fundamental, and could have developed differently. That's why I'm being a stickler for law above intuition or common sense.) $\endgroup$
    – LSpice
    Commented Oct 31 at 12:20
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    $\begingroup$ @LSpice There is a partial answer to your question about the Wayback Machine here. $\endgroup$
    – Timothy Chow
    Commented Nov 1 at 23:40
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Emil Jeřábek's answer already warns you that this might not be allowed legally. However, in many cases the Internet archive already has these images archived without the need to upload them: for instance, both images in the answer that you were interested in are already uploaded there: 1 2.

So there is nothing to do to future-proof that answer, assuming you trust the internet archive to stay open.

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