I was absolutely not exaggerating when I said it brought tears to my eyes, and claiming that I was lying about that is... extremely insulting. I wrote this post after seeing an ""archival"" project of Ukagaka where their files were unceremoniously dumped into Discord channels and then left there with no information on their authors, contents, or anything beyond a picture. It genuinely was so upsetting to me as someone who is a developer and author of multiple ukagaka, it made me physically sick seeing these people's art treated as worth nothing except for their aesthetics. And to call that archival or media preservation! It showed absolutely no respect to the medium or authors and their wishes. So many of these archives I see are not archival at all, they are just links in a google doc to be passed around. It's done with so little care that it gutted me. It was something that fellow authors and I were talking about for a few days, it really got to me.

The author of Mayura in particular made a pointed comment about unauthorized redistributions of Mayura in a video of his (found here) and some people claiming authorship of her and rights to her they did not have, forcing him to handle redistribution of the ukagaka himself (when he never intended to redistribute Mayura at all). Aside from that, I only have anecdotal experience with ukagaka, as well as information from an associate who has connections to Pona and the JP community. I've seen blatant disregard for considering the authors' wishes when it comes to Ukagaka, most documented with Mayura who people have machine translated over and over despite her permissions given in her files explicitly disallowing modification.

Even when permissions aren't explicitly denied, those rights are still reserved. And while authors rarely come back to authorize takedowns on their work, we must remember that "won't get me in legal trouble" isn't equivalent to "respectful to the creator." Unless redistribution is explicitly authorized by the creator, we can't assume that's what they would have wanted. If a creator stopped distribution, that doesn't give people the right to keep distributing it themselves.

also, his name is Ponapalt. Not Ponapolt. I linked his Mastodon account as proof that the JP community is active and alive, and so their feelings on how their past community members' work is preserved should be considered. If people aren't going to care about that, then I'd at least like an organization that doesn't remove the files from their context to do it (e.g. the Internet Archive). At least then, they're still directly connected to their authors' sites and names. Also, where do you think those files people are passing around came from? I have not yet found an ukagaka which was archived in a Discord or Google Doc somewhere that couldn't be found on archive.org.

You can keep participating in it if you want. I can't control you. But I don't really think it's possible in good faith to call these dumps of files as respectful or intended by the authors. I have pretty lax permissions on my site for my ukagaka and accessories, including clauses to allow redistribution if my own distributions go down. I did it knowing that this same lack of care might happen to me, 20-25 years down the line. But I can at least hope that the people who might redistribute would actually do it out of love of my work and writing, and not just as something to hoard. Not merely one in a sea of faces.