> Is it unacceptable for an artist to throw her art away after it has finished its museum tour? Should a parent hang on to every drawing their child has ever made?

This boils down to the public domain, IMO. We have made a long practice of rescuing art from private caches and trash bins to make them publicly available after the artists' passing (the copyright expiring); regardless of their views on what should happen with those works.

> Consider why you feel it is unethical for the author or persons responsible for the work to ever stop selling it.

Selling something and then pulling it down is fundamentally an attempt to create scarcity for something that would otherwise be freely available. It's a marketing technique that capitalizes on our fear of missing out to make a sale.

Again, the right to even sell writings was enshrined in law as an exception to the norm of of it immediately being part of the public domain, in an effort to encourage more writing.

Not sure we need any more encouragement on that front ;)

Sure, after I'm dead, you can do with my stuff whatever you like.

But while I'm alive.... it's my stuff and I can do with it what I like. Including tearing it up because I hate it now and don't want anyone to look at it.

It seems like this is conflating two issues: 1) The right of others to copy your work. 2) The obligation of the author to make the work available.

This thread stems from the second; about whether a site owner is justified in deleting or rearranging old pages/information on their website.