9 ms·

This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for t

This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for the life of the author plus 70 years. We know there are gobs of cultural artifacts from as recently as the 80s (videos, games, etc.) that are permanently lost. Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.

whitemary 4y ago
This is what capitalism would have happen to the bulk of culture.
GalenErso 4y ago
I download YouTube videos I like. A number of them aren't available anymore. As far as I am aware, I have the last backups. I've also downloaded obscure .swf files and weird soundtracks and sound effects from obscure and now deprecated flash games I used to play in my youth.
- hakonhaki 4y ago
  Not a huge collector but so checkout moonwalk.swf Not too hard to find, but a beautiful animation of a human struggling yo walk home on the moon… you’ll love it
- Ruthalas 4y ago
  If you feel like chatting with others who also archive YouTube (and other) content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC We maintain a central list [1] of content that various members have archived, so that when content is removed from YouTube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and sometimes direct efforts to preserve specific content. [1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w
- amatecha 4y ago
  Yeah I've started doing the same. When I [rarely] log into my YT account to find an old favorite from a couple years ago or whatever, I notice that something like 2/3 of my Favorites are unavailable now (I've been using YT since it launched so that kinda skews the chances in that direction of course, but the point remains).
judge2020 4y ago
I don't think copyright has much to do with it, but rather the lack of (cheap) recording/duplicating equipment people had access to before the 80's. As soon as VCRs were on the scene, your average American quickly got to recording broadcast content to VHS tapes for either sharing it with friends or personal archival.
- zehaeva 4y ago
  I'm sure all of those VHS tapes are still perfectly viewable today!
- MPSimmons 4y ago
  The point of the parent comment is that, if the copyright people had their way, VCRs and the like would be irrelevant, because they would make it so that you _couldn't_ back up media. It's a pattern that keeps repeating itself. Copyright owners with deep enough pockets try to build "anti-piracy" technical measures which actually just prevent people from backing up their media, while piracy continues unabated regardless of those technical hurdles that impact 99% of people.
  - LocalH 4y ago
    Correct. Jack Valenti famously equated the VCR to the Boston Strangler.
  - tivert 4y ago
    > The point of the parent comment is that, if the copyright people had their way, VCRs and the like would be irrelevant, because they would make it so that you _couldn't_ back up media. The (grand)parent comment didn't talk about any of that.
    - MPSimmons 4y ago
      I don't really want to get into an argument on HackerNews about this, but I took it as read in this sentence: >This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture
vlunkr 4y ago
Sadly pirates are a critical piece of media preservation.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Why sadly? If the corporation who owns the original IP, abandoned it for 10+ years with no way of legitimately buying it from them, then it means they don't want our money and they don't care about it, so it's fair game. I'm doing my part.
  - skyyler 4y ago
    Sadly; because a noble pursuit has been reduced to literal crime...
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      Exactly. If the content owners were more responsible, or if IP laws were better, it wouldn't be necessary.
  - jzb 4y ago
    Sadly because the industry actively fights against it, and people can be punished for it. Also "sadly" because it's not exactly a dependable process -- we're depending on people to spontaneously choose to preserve / share media widely enough there will be decent copies when/if they go out of "legitimate" circulation. It'd be better if archiving & preserving copies were a mandatory step to being awarded copyright protection. (Which would not displace filesharing, of course...)
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Another sad thing is the mentality of IP rightsholders. For abandoned songs/movies/works that don't make any money anymore, they'd rather expend the cost/effort to destroy them than allow them to be distributed for free, even though destroying them is likely more expensive. Totally malicious. Reminds me of grocery stores that throw out food at the end of the day and spend effort guarding the dumpsters so nobody gets food for free.
beerandt 4y ago
Idk the exact mechanisms that should be used, but have long said that copyright protection of all forms should be dependent on the rights holder depositing and funding the archival (to a minimum length of the expiration of the work's copyright + x years), such that public has access to the work upon expiration. Include a mechanism that allows encryption keys to be held in escrow, to be released publicly for all drm schemes the work is released on. The LoC may or may not be the best avenue for such a scheme, but it should be funded by the rights holder as a condition of the protected term (or maybe for an extension beyond a base term of ~12years ala patents).
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  [dead]
- beerandt 4y ago
  To reply to the dead sibling comment: Depositing a copy of a book to the LoC is already the (dated) default behavior for hard-copy published text. Even if it's not strictly required, it mostly works. But as I said, perhaps you get a base 12 years protection just by publishing (the status quo, but shorter base term), and only register the source/ archive if protection beyond that is financially worthwhile. DRM content that wants DMCA type protection (hopefully a more reasonably thought out protection) requires a single tested key in escrow per protected work, or doesn't get any circumvention or takedown protection. The exact mechanisms and terms would need to be tweaked by format and maybe even market, but the idea is to create underlying aligned incentives, without unduly burdening casual creators who might not wish to opt-in.
  - 6510 4y ago
    I'm honestly curious, what does it cost per year to archive a picture?
bazoom42 4y ago
It is not illegal to own and preserve media which is still under copyright. IP is not the problem, the problem is nobody cared until it was too late.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Format shifting in the US is only permitted for audio recordings. Doing the same for video is a copyright violation even if you keep it to yourself.
  - ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
    That’s only true if you have to circumvent encryption.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Copyright law from before DMCA still applies. It doesn't just disappear because it's easy to make copies.
      - ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
        Copyright law didn't prevent you from copying video for home use. Look up the Disney vs. Sony case, which was a landmark.
        kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        If that were true there would have been no need for the AHRA. Copying audio tapes at home was a copyright violation. Doing the same for VHS was and still is.
        ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
        No. That was still based on DIGITAL recording, and the lie that "perfect digital copies" would cause an explosion of piracy. And of course our "representatives" toadied up to the corporations and abetted them in screwing consumers. And, by levying an asinine "tax" on blank media, it actually AUTHORIZED home copying by presuming guilt. Anybody, yes ANYBODY based in reality knew that essentially all "piracy" took place in dorm rooms and bedrooms on double-cassette boom boxes... FAR from "perfect" copies. People who could afford DAT recorders were not going to be sapping record-company profits. And we all know what happened next: The "perfect digital copies" lie was further debunked with the ascendancy of MP3... another lossy and imperfect reproduction.
throwaway6477 4y ago
[dead]
mypastself 4y ago
Per the article, first ever attempts at preservation were intended for copyright protection. I’m not following the logic of why IP owners would want media to become lost.
- hnbad 4y ago
  The logic is called "tax write-off": https://collider.com/final-space-pulled-from-streaming/ https://collider.com/final-space-pulled-from-streaming/ Of course in this case it's still possible the studio retains original copies in its archives but according to the article, the write-off means the show can not be re-released so those copies literally have no value to the IP owners and might be destroyed, too.
vkou 4y ago
> Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time. Which is great for creating cultural scarcity, because it means that people will: 1. Keep buying new things. 2. Pay through the nose for rare old cultural artifacts.
justinator 4y ago
Someone's gunna lose the private key for all that DRM media and then whoops.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  [dead]
dclowd9901 4y ago
It seems like there needs to be some understanding of “benefitting from one’s own work” as part of this conversation. If I make a thing, and am actively providing it for consumption, I have an interest in maintaining its integrity. Contrarily, if I have made something, but it’s just sitting idling away as something I simply own as an IP, it will be allowed to languish, in every sense of the word. There are similar concepts with trademarks; if you don’t actively defend trademark usages, you stand the risk of losing it to the public domain. Likewise, if you don’t actually provide your creation to the public in a consumable way, you should lose the ability to claim it.
CamArchibald 4y ago
[dead]
tivert 4y ago
> This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for the life of the author plus 70 years. We know there are gobs of cultural artifacts from as recently as the 80s (videos, games, etc.) that are permanently lost. > Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time. Firstly, copyright doesn't have anything do with the problem outlined in the OP, that 75% of "golden age" silent movies have been lost. The reason it identifies is that these films were "few, fragile, flammable" and that "almost no one thought they were worth saving." Copies weren't going to magically appear: if they were fragile, expensive to produce, and viewed as ephemeral nothing short of some kind of expensive government mandate would have led to much higher preservation rates. Such a mandate would not happen unless there was a contemporary interest in preservation, which there wasn't. Secondly, running an archive isn't free. Short copyright terms might actually lead to less preservation, since that would make the creator be even less motivated to preserve the work for the long term. I'm not sure what you mean by "independent archivalists," but if it's data hoarders (individuals or collectively) that's not really going to cut it. The data on someone's hard drive array is very unlikely live past its owner, it will be almost certainly junked by the heirs to the estate. Preservation really requires an institution.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > Secondly, running an archive isn't free. Short copyright terms might actually lead to less preservation, since that would make the creator be even less motivated to preserve the work for the long term. Yet archives have very high public value. We've recognized that since the formation of the library of congress. The issue I think we have is we already have a system mandated to archive copyrighted material, yet it's not been advanced to accommodate the digital era and there's no mandate that IP holders aid it in retention. I think increasing public spending so the likes of archive.org can continue to function would be a net good for society.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  > Firstly, copyright doesn't have anything do with the problem outlined in the OP Sure but it will probably lead to the same thing happening again.
javajosh 4y ago
Surely that much data has value somewhere, and a marketplace can be formed where decaying film on one side is auctioned to AI training data stores on the other. Older material is more valuable since it starts human measurement earlier, and so can predict longer-term shifts. (Imagination in service to neoliberal capitalism - it's a real world _Hyperion_ novel, forums like this mind-jack you with arcane symbols into miniscule wiggles in the GHz range, roughly 1500*8 bytes of them at a time, pushed through a radio, into the kernel, into a program, and spat out into an array of glowing quantum effects... But still, even here, Buster Keaton is funny.)
snowwrestler 4y ago
Copyright laws govern distribution, and permit noncommercial uses such as archiving copies. Technologically it has never been easier to capture and store media, and many people and organizations do. Things from the 80s are permanently lost simply because no one bothered to preserve copies of them.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Yeah it's easy, but nobody does it for real. I live in a small country with a weird language, that was one a part of a larger country with a few other weird languages and a lot of good music. A bunch of that music is lost forever now... some newer artists still play the old songs, but there are no recorded originals. For some songs you can only find shitty quality recordings on youtube when someone recorded an audio tape to a youtube video at shitty quality and split into 10minute chunks. Original recording studios don't exist anymore, CDs maybe existed, maybe not, tapes surely did, but those degraded a lot, modern streaming has made piracy hard, since there are not a lot of listeners who would rip that, and youtube only has that song in a video format, with a video intro, and a silent part in between to make the video make sense (unlike a radio edit). And even if people somehow downloaded and stored that music, how am I supposed to get it too? Torrenting is hard for many people, services like kazaa don't exist anymore, existing torrent sites close down, zero seeders on what's left over and even less ways to actually find it online. Yeah, sure, all that music could fit on a single modern hard drive, but nobody put it there and made it available for others, and in turn, it is lost, either fully (noone has the HQ original anymore) or partially (some people have it, for now, but others are unable to obtain it). I'd much prefer some national archive taking those recordings (music, videos, books, etc.), digitizing them (or preferably starting with a digital version) and then offer it for download after some reasonable amount of time (which would be way shorter than death+70 years). A good indicator for 'when' would be the availability of the media... Am I unable to buy it in a reasonable way for a reasonable price? Ok, it's protected. Noone is selling it anymore, or not selling it in my country (even digitally)... the author/publshed obviously doesn't want my money, so why complain if it's on offer for free. TLDR: think of your favourite non-mainstream band from 20 years ago and try to download their songs.. good luck with that.
breck 4y ago
Stephan Kinsella's talk "Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP", is a must watch. There's no reason to have IP law and in fact there is actually good reason to believe they stand on shaky legal ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0RXfGGMGPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0RXfGGMGPE One of the arguments he brings up is that the Constitution specifically says "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". It can be argued that IP law does not do this. In fact it does the opposite. As soon as you have a patent or copyright on something you are incentivized to not promote the progress of science and arts, at least not until your monopoly terms expire (which is never, with the copyright extensions).
- Animats 4y ago
  Even better, there's this report from the Republican Study Group, in 2012, recommending shorter copyright terms.[1] The staffer who wrote that was fired. [1] https://archive.org/details/RscThreeMythsAboutCopyrightLaw/ https://archive.org/details/RscThreeMythsAboutCopyrightLaw/
throwaway689236 4y ago
Intellectual property is not really a property, it's a limited time monopoly preference. If you have a chair as your property, it doesn't magically become public property in N years, it's yours forever. Because it's a real property, unlike IP. More than that, IP is anti-property in nature, because it restricts you from using your real property, you can't use your printing press to print a book that you like. I know that there's an argument to be made about authors wanting to eat, but that's a separate issue, it doesn't change the fact that IP is logically inconsistent and the "property" part is misleading.
- zdw 4y ago
  "Imaginary Property" might be a better name for this pattern of thought.
- fritzo 4y ago
  Gosh how many folks here believe any sort of property is "real"? I guess I see intellectual property as made up rules, just like exclusion rights on real property are made up rules. We're just riffing off mammalian instinct. We have complete freedom to make up different rules.
  - slim 4y ago
    "property" is the simplest form of governance, whereas a resource is assigned to a person which takes all the decisions regarding the subject including transferring the property to another person. it's really a very old governance model well understood in most societies. now IP is a confusing form of governance because all the contradictions mentioned by gran parent comment while being named "property" and because it's being applied to something that is not a resource which means it does not even need governance in first place
    - bcrosby95 4y ago
      I've come to view physical property as the odd one out. IP makes sense to me - you are assigning ownership of purely human created constructs, and someone assigning me Mickey Mouse doesn't use up a resource and prevent you from making your own IP. But physical property... you're telling me that someone ('someone' being a government - who probably took it by force from some other group of people) can just "assign" me something no human had a hand in creating, I can morph it, then sell it to some other person for a buck? The whole chain of custody is tainted. I should not be able to "own" these things no human created, at best, I should be able to rent it from
Dalewyn 4y ago
Copyright does not inhibit archiving. The problems begin when people want to distribute those archives.
woolion 4y ago
It would seem it's actively in their interests to have the most of their customers forget. First, these companies do serve very derivative content, that wouldn't be remotely interesting when compared to their inspirations. The comparison in many case is so unfair that it shed lights on the incompetence of the team. For some example, there was the 'definitive edition' of the PS2 era GTA games, if you go on Steam you can't find the originals. You can buy the definitive edition that stands at a mighty 0.6 user score on Metacritic though. For movies I'm not sure what would illustrate best but when the Ghostbusters reboot movie came out, it seems they made an effort not to acknowledge the originals. And when the big toys line-up came up after the reboot's disaster of a reception, they did as if it didn't exist and went all for the nostalgia.
throwaway290 4y ago
The article is not about that. There would be no archivalists because no one saw film as art or something worth saving. Copyright was not the issue at hand. Meanwhile copyright protection is required to encourage creative people to make things

whitemary 4y ago

This is what capitalism would have happen to the bulk of culture.

GalenErso 4y ago

I download YouTube videos I like. A number of them aren't available anymore. As far as I am aware, I have the last backups. I've also downloaded obscure .swf files and weird soundtracks and sound effects from obscure and now deprecated flash games I used to play in my youth.

hakonhaki 4y ago
Not a huge collector but so checkout moonwalk.swf Not too hard to find, but a beautiful animation of a human struggling yo walk home on the moon… you’ll love it
Ruthalas 4y ago
If you feel like chatting with others who also archive YouTube (and other) content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC We maintain a central list [1] of content that various members have archived, so that when content is removed from YouTube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and sometimes direct efforts to preserve specific content. [1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w
amatecha 4y ago
Yeah I've started doing the same. When I [rarely] log into my YT account to find an old favorite from a couple years ago or whatever, I notice that something like 2/3 of my Favorites are unavailable now (I've been using YT since it launched so that kinda skews the chances in that direction of course, but the point remains).

judge2020 4y ago

I don't think copyright has much to do with it, but rather the lack of (cheap) recording/duplicating equipment people had access to before the 80's. As soon as VCRs were on the scene, your average American quickly got to recording broadcast content to VHS tapes for either sharing it with friends or personal archival.

zehaeva 4y ago
I'm sure all of those VHS tapes are still perfectly viewable today!
MPSimmons 4y ago
The point of the parent comment is that, if the copyright people had their way, VCRs and the like would be irrelevant, because they would make it so that you _couldn't_ back up media. It's a pattern that keeps repeating itself. Copyright owners with deep enough pockets try to build "anti-piracy" technical measures which actually just prevent people from backing up their media, while piracy continues unabated regardless of those technical hurdles that impact 99% of people.
- LocalH 4y ago
  Correct. Jack Valenti famously equated the VCR to the Boston Strangler.
- tivert 4y ago
  > The point of the parent comment is that, if the copyright people had their way, VCRs and the like would be irrelevant, because they would make it so that you _couldn't_ back up media. The (grand)parent comment didn't talk about any of that.
  - MPSimmons 4y ago
    I don't really want to get into an argument on HackerNews about this, but I took it as read in this sentence: >This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture

vlunkr 4y ago

Sadly pirates are a critical piece of media preservation.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Why sadly? If the corporation who owns the original IP, abandoned it for 10+ years with no way of legitimately buying it from them, then it means they don't want our money and they don't care about it, so it's fair game. I'm doing my part.
- skyyler 4y ago
  Sadly; because a noble pursuit has been reduced to literal crime...
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    Exactly. If the content owners were more responsible, or if IP laws were better, it wouldn't be necessary.
- jzb 4y ago
  Sadly because the industry actively fights against it, and people can be punished for it. Also "sadly" because it's not exactly a dependable process -- we're depending on people to spontaneously choose to preserve / share media widely enough there will be decent copies when/if they go out of "legitimate" circulation. It'd be better if archiving & preserving copies were a mandatory step to being awarded copyright protection. (Which would not displace filesharing, of course...)
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Another sad thing is the mentality of IP rightsholders. For abandoned songs/movies/works that don't make any money anymore, they'd rather expend the cost/effort to destroy them than allow them to be distributed for free, even though destroying them is likely more expensive. Totally malicious. Reminds me of grocery stores that throw out food at the end of the day and spend effort guarding the dumpsters so nobody gets food for free.

beerandt 4y ago

Idk the exact mechanisms that should be used, but have long said that copyright protection of all forms should be dependent on the rights holder depositing and funding the archival (to a minimum length of the expiration of the work's copyright + x years), such that public has access to the work upon expiration. Include a mechanism that allows encryption keys to be held in escrow, to be released publicly for all drm schemes the work is released on. The LoC may or may not be the best avenue for such a scheme, but it should be funded by the rights holder as a condition of the protected term (or maybe for an extension beyond a base term of ~12years ala patents).

sacrosancty 4y ago
[dead]
beerandt 4y ago
To reply to the dead sibling comment: Depositing a copy of a book to the LoC is already the (dated) default behavior for hard-copy published text. Even if it's not strictly required, it mostly works. But as I said, perhaps you get a base 12 years protection just by publishing (the status quo, but shorter base term), and only register the source/ archive if protection beyond that is financially worthwhile. DRM content that wants DMCA type protection (hopefully a more reasonably thought out protection) requires a single tested key in escrow per protected work, or doesn't get any circumvention or takedown protection. The exact mechanisms and terms would need to be tweaked by format and maybe even market, but the idea is to create underlying aligned incentives, without unduly burdening casual creators who might not wish to opt-in.
- 6510 4y ago
  I'm honestly curious, what does it cost per year to archive a picture?

bazoom42 4y ago

It is not illegal to own and preserve media which is still under copyright. IP is not the problem, the problem is nobody cared until it was too late.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Format shifting in the US is only permitted for audio recordings. Doing the same for video is a copyright violation even if you keep it to yourself.
- ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
  That’s only true if you have to circumvent encryption.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Copyright law from before DMCA still applies. It doesn't just disappear because it's easy to make copies.
    - ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
      Copyright law didn't prevent you from copying video for home use. Look up the Disney vs. Sony case, which was a landmark.
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        If that were true there would have been no need for the AHRA. Copying audio tapes at home was a copyright violation. Doing the same for VHS was and still is.
        ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
        No. That was still based on DIGITAL recording, and the lie that "perfect digital copies" would cause an explosion of piracy. And of course our "representatives" toadied up to the corporations and abetted them in screwing consumers. And, by levying an asinine "tax" on blank media, it actually AUTHORIZED home copying by presuming guilt. Anybody, yes ANYBODY based in reality knew that essentially all "piracy" took place in dorm rooms and bedrooms on double-cassette boom boxes... FAR from "perfect" copies. People who could afford DAT recorders were not going to be sapping record-company profits. And we all know what happened next: The "perfect digital copies" lie was further debunked with the ascendancy of MP3... another lossy and imperfect reproduction.

throwaway6477 4y ago

[dead]

mypastself 4y ago

Per the article, first ever attempts at preservation were intended for copyright protection. I’m not following the logic of why IP owners would want media to become lost.

hnbad 4y ago
The logic is called "tax write-off": https://collider.com/final-space-pulled-from-streaming/ https://collider.com/final-space-pulled-from-streaming/ Of course in this case it's still possible the studio retains original copies in its archives but according to the article, the write-off means the show can not be re-released so those copies literally have no value to the IP owners and might be destroyed, too.

vkou 4y ago

> Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time. Which is great for creating cultural scarcity, because it means that people will: 1. Keep buying new things. 2. Pay through the nose for rare old cultural artifacts.

justinator 4y ago

Someone's gunna lose the private key for all that DRM media and then whoops.

sacrosancty 4y ago
[dead]

dclowd9901 4y ago

It seems like there needs to be some understanding of “benefitting from one’s own work” as part of this conversation. If I make a thing, and am actively providing it for consumption, I have an interest in maintaining its integrity. Contrarily, if I have made something, but it’s just sitting idling away as something I simply own as an IP, it will be allowed to languish, in every sense of the word. There are similar concepts with trademarks; if you don’t actively defend trademark usages, you stand the risk of losing it to the public domain. Likewise, if you don’t actually provide your creation to the public in a consumable way, you should lose the ability to claim it.

CamArchibald 4y ago

[dead]

tivert 4y ago

> This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for the life of the author plus 70 years. We know there are gobs of cultural artifacts from as recently as the 80s (videos, games, etc.) that are permanently lost. > Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time. Firstly, copyright doesn't have anything do with the problem outlined in the OP, that 75% of "golden age" silent movies have been lost. The reason it identifies is that these films were "few, fragile, flammable" and that "almost no one thought they were worth saving." Copies weren't going to magically appear: if they were fragile, expensive to produce, and viewed as ephemeral nothing short of some kind of expensive government mandate would have led to much higher preservation rates. Such a mandate would not happen unless there was a contemporary interest in preservation, which there wasn't. Secondly, running an archive isn't free. Short copyright terms might actually lead to less preservation, since that would make the creator be even less motivated to preserve the work for the long term. I'm not sure what you mean by "independent archivalists," but if it's data hoarders (individuals or collectively) that's not really going to cut it. The data on someone's hard drive array is very unlikely live past its owner, it will be almost certainly junked by the heirs to the estate. Preservation really requires an institution.

cogman10 4y ago
> Secondly, running an archive isn't free. Short copyright terms might actually lead to less preservation, since that would make the creator be even less motivated to preserve the work for the long term. Yet archives have very high public value. We've recognized that since the formation of the library of congress. The issue I think we have is we already have a system mandated to archive copyrighted material, yet it's not been advanced to accommodate the digital era and there's no mandate that IP holders aid it in retention. I think increasing public spending so the likes of archive.org can continue to function would be a net good for society.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
> Firstly, copyright doesn't have anything do with the problem outlined in the OP Sure but it will probably lead to the same thing happening again.

javajosh 4y ago

Surely that much data has value somewhere, and a marketplace can be formed where decaying film on one side is auctioned to AI training data stores on the other. Older material is more valuable since it starts human measurement earlier, and so can predict longer-term shifts. (Imagination in service to neoliberal capitalism - it's a real world _Hyperion_ novel, forums like this mind-jack you with arcane symbols into miniscule wiggles in the GHz range, roughly 1500*8 bytes of them at a time, pushed through a radio, into the kernel, into a program, and spat out into an array of glowing quantum effects... But still, even here, Buster Keaton is funny.)

snowwrestler 4y ago

Copyright laws govern distribution, and permit noncommercial uses such as archiving copies. Technologically it has never been easier to capture and store media, and many people and organizations do. Things from the 80s are permanently lost simply because no one bothered to preserve copies of them.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Yeah it's easy, but nobody does it for real. I live in a small country with a weird language, that was one a part of a larger country with a few other weird languages and a lot of good music. A bunch of that music is lost forever now... some newer artists still play the old songs, but there are no recorded originals. For some songs you can only find shitty quality recordings on youtube when someone recorded an audio tape to a youtube video at shitty quality and split into 10minute chunks. Original recording studios don't exist anymore, CDs maybe existed, maybe not, tapes surely did, but those degraded a lot, modern streaming has made piracy hard, since there are not a lot of listeners who would rip that, and youtube only has that song in a video format, with a video intro, and a silent part in between to make the video make sense (unlike a radio edit). And even if people somehow downloaded and stored that music, how am I supposed to get it too? Torrenting is hard for many people, services like kazaa don't exist anymore, existing torrent sites close down, zero seeders on what's left over and even less ways to actually find it online. Yeah, sure, all that music could fit on a single modern hard drive, but nobody put it there and made it available for others, and in turn, it is lost, either fully (noone has the HQ original anymore) or partially (some people have it, for now, but others are unable to obtain it). I'd much prefer some national archive taking those recordings (music, videos, books, etc.), digitizing them (or preferably starting with a digital version) and then offer it for download after some reasonable amount of time (which would be way shorter than death+70 years). A good indicator for 'when' would be the availability of the media... Am I unable to buy it in a reasonable way for a reasonable price? Ok, it's protected. Noone is selling it anymore, or not selling it in my country (even digitally)... the author/publshed obviously doesn't want my money, so why complain if it's on offer for free. TLDR: think of your favourite non-mainstream band from 20 years ago and try to download their songs.. good luck with that.

breck 4y ago

Stephan Kinsella's talk "Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP", is a must watch. There's no reason to have IP law and in fact there is actually good reason to believe they stand on shaky legal ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0RXfGGMGPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0RXfGGMGPE One of the arguments he brings up is that the Constitution specifically says "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". It can be argued that IP law does not do this. In fact it does the opposite. As soon as you have a patent or copyright on something you are incentivized to not promote the progress of science and arts, at least not until your monopoly terms expire (which is never, with the copyright extensions).

Animats 4y ago
Even better, there's this report from the Republican Study Group, in 2012, recommending shorter copyright terms.[1] The staffer who wrote that was fired. [1] https://archive.org/details/RscThreeMythsAboutCopyrightLaw/ https://archive.org/details/RscThreeMythsAboutCopyrightLaw/

throwaway689236 4y ago

Intellectual property is not really a property, it's a limited time monopoly preference. If you have a chair as your property, it doesn't magically become public property in N years, it's yours forever. Because it's a real property, unlike IP. More than that, IP is anti-property in nature, because it restricts you from using your real property, you can't use your printing press to print a book that you like. I know that there's an argument to be made about authors wanting to eat, but that's a separate issue, it doesn't change the fact that IP is logically inconsistent and the "property" part is misleading.

zdw 4y ago
"Imaginary Property" might be a better name for this pattern of thought.
fritzo 4y ago
Gosh how many folks here believe any sort of property is "real"? I guess I see intellectual property as made up rules, just like exclusion rights on real property are made up rules. We're just riffing off mammalian instinct. We have complete freedom to make up different rules.
- slim 4y ago
  "property" is the simplest form of governance, whereas a resource is assigned to a person which takes all the decisions regarding the subject including transferring the property to another person. it's really a very old governance model well understood in most societies. now IP is a confusing form of governance because all the contradictions mentioned by gran parent comment while being named "property" and because it's being applied to something that is not a resource which means it does not even need governance in first place
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    I've come to view physical property as the odd one out. IP makes sense to me - you are assigning ownership of purely human created constructs, and someone assigning me Mickey Mouse doesn't use up a resource and prevent you from making your own IP. But physical property... you're telling me that someone ('someone' being a government - who probably took it by force from some other group of people) can just "assign" me something no human had a hand in creating, I can morph it, then sell it to some other person for a buck? The whole chain of custody is tainted. I should not be able to "own" these things no human created, at best, I should be able to rent it from

Dalewyn 4y ago

woolion 4y ago

It would seem it's actively in their interests to have the most of their customers forget. First, these companies do serve very derivative content, that wouldn't be remotely interesting when compared to their inspirations. The comparison in many case is so unfair that it shed lights on the incompetence of the team. For some example, there was the 'definitive edition' of the PS2 era GTA games, if you go on Steam you can't find the originals. You can buy the definitive edition that stands at a mighty 0.6 user score on Metacritic though. For movies I'm not sure what would illustrate best but when the Ghostbusters reboot movie came out, it seems they made an effort not to acknowledge the originals. And when the big toys line-up came up after the reboot's disaster of a reception, they did as if it didn't exist and went all for the nostalgia.

throwaway290 4y ago

The article is not about that. There would be no archivalists because no one saw film as art or something worth saving. Copyright was not the issue at hand. Meanwhile copyright protection is required to encourage creative people to make things