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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Pirates are just independent corsairs. The latter are pirates who work for the king, they are doing the same kind of robbery, but since the king profits off it, they are called "legal". That's what modern copyright holders are: pirates backed by the king.
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.
If you feel like chatting with others who also archive YouTube (and other) content, consider stopping by my discord server:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> If you have a chair as your property, it doesn't magically become public property in N years, it's yours forever.
Copyright lasts 70 years past the death of the author. I assure you, you will not own that chair after you die.
Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct. No will, and the decision is made by the probate court. No heirs? Then your chair does go to the state. Or maybe it gets left on the street to be taken by any member of the public who sees it and happens to want it.
Intellectual property in the end is really not that different from any other kind of property. Like any form of property, it's a social construct that exists because people think and act like it exists, and because the resources of the state are used to ensure that any dissenters are suppressed and/or punished.
Ultimately, the reason that your chair sits in your living room, rather than in your better-armed or more muscular neighbor's fireplace, is the same reason that you can't sell bootleg copies of the latest Disney movie on Amazon: the voluntary observation and enforcement of the law by human beings.
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.
Try making that argument to a peasant prior to Enclosure.
How is "I own this text" less arbitrary than "I own this forest"? You can't "own" a forest, you can only prevent other people from entering it but if the forest is large enough you can't even do so on your own, even if you live in the forest.
Heck, while you might "own" a chair, how do you "own" a million chairs? You can't use a million chairs. You can't even store a million chairs in one place. You certainly can't guard them yourself, much like the forest.
And how do you "own" a business? How do you "own" the factory when you're not even using it, nor would be able to do so yourself and instead you have to pay dozens of people to use it for you?
"Property" literally just means "exclusive claim backed up by force". That's the primary function of the state, it's why we have police.
> I know that there's an argument to be made about authors wanting to eat
My view is that we should build a system that ensures every person gets to eat (and have shelter, medical care, other necessities) without the need to pay for it, simply because this is the right thing to do.
Then under such a system, we can eliminate intellectual property restrictions, because they will no longer be necessary to ensure that artists eat. IP restrictions actually slow down innovation, so eliminating them will have huge benefits to society.
By the way you can ensure that everyone gets fed etc without paying for it by building an economy where everyone is part owner of the productive machinery they depend upon. Then no one is poor. Creating an economy where a preponderance of the firms are cooperatives is a good start. So this can be done in a traditionally libertarian way, without high taxes or strong government intervention.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>
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.
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
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.)
Which Golden Age? Yes, the preservation for pre-1927 films is very very poor, 3/4's was lost, with most of that loss being things make before 1925.
Much more of the post-1927 content was preserved (more of it was preserved with sound once we switched to sound on film) - I'd note however that Silent Movies are virtually unrecognizable by modern viewers as being even the same art form as sound pictures - and sound movies didnt reach the same... production values? as the silents until 1936-37.
The period between 1927-and 1937 was a period of reinvention and learning of a new medium, which is why - my general take is the golden age of Hollywood was 1939 to 1959.
Consider what films came out in 1939 -
* Gone with the Wind
* Wizard of Oz
* Mr. Smith goes to Washington
These are films that still find audiences today, now - 80 years or so on.
Most Americans might have seen one movie produced between 1927 and 1938 - but most people who are above 30 have seen at least two those three movies at least once.
And that trend continues from there on - where 1940 to 1959, most americans have seen one movie released in each of those years.
So while I dont disagree that we are losing heritage in these things - I take issue with their definition of Golden Age and the idea that there is value in saving everything ever written or filmed.
Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades, it was meant to be ephemeral topical entertainment, and functionally intended to be disposable. Most of the production of Poverty Row, and B pictures by the majors are like this, they were intended for Block Booking, and largely just as a way to fill the content needs of the theaters and as a way to provide steady revenue in the event an A picture flopped.
1939? I suppose you have to pick a year and call that the cutoff.
But you're cutoff leaves to the "Dark Ages" the films Frankenstein (1931), Love Me Tonight (1931), 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), King Kong (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), The Thin Man (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to name a few.
When I was mentioning most people have only see one pre-1939 film, I was specifically thinking of Snow White.
While I do not deny that movies of that era are often highly influential on later films, they do not lend themselves to modern watchability, because of the technical limitations of the medium at the time. Snow White being a notable exception because it was the literal first of its kind, and Disney has successfully restored and rereleased it decade after decade.
Largely I'm a believer that the merits of the film itself will lead to its preservation and often restoration and that preservation just for the sake of preservation isn't all that valuable a use of a limited resource.
Also The Invisible Man (1933) and Easy Living (1937), but I agree with the parent that 1939 seems to be about when modern-ish script quality and production values became the norm.
> As with Pompeii graffiti and warehouse cuneiform tally tablets, from the anthropological perspective, the ephemeral is interesting.
It's only interesting after a looong period were it was very much uninteresting, causing so much to be destroyed until what remained became interesting as a rarity.
I think it's very likely that process of destruction is necessary to make past ephemera valuable.
The costs to try to save all of it are vast - the costs to try to save some of it are pretty reasonable. What's interesting is what has survived from the 20's was mostly by accident.
Yes, unfortunately, the title is clickbait. Generally "Golden Age of Hollywood" is a nebulous term, but only tends to encompass the last few years of silent films (if that).
In general, as I understand it, silent films were lost primarily for two reasons:
A) The film medium of the time was nitrocellulose, which unfortunately is highly flammable (several films were lost to vault fires) as well as being susceptible to decomposition.
B) With "talkies" becoming the dominant form after the late 1920s, the silver content in some of the old silent films was seen as being more valuable than the actual content. In other cases I think films were just dumped, being seen as not having any value and worth the storage costs anymore.
Television underwent a similar phenomenon from the beginning until the 1970s-1980s, due to videotape being expensive and reusable, and older material being seen as not economically valuable (especially after the transition from black and white to color). Doctor Who is probably the most famous example of a serial with missing episodes, but my understanding is that more rigorous archiving was not the norm for entertainment seen as more "disposable" (eg game shows, news programs) well after television companies archived their prime time programs.
Yeah, misleading headline. The article says "During the golden age of the silent movie (1912-29)", which is distinct from "the golden age of Hollywood" which typically describes the studio era, up through 1959, as you say.
Whatever period you define as the golden age of Hollywood, most of the movies are probably lost to time. That phrase — golden age — is a canard if it distracts from the actual point, which is that we've lost access to important artifacts of our culture and history, and we can't ever get it back.
Also, the fact that people have not seen a lot of movies from before 1939 does not argue that they should not be preserved. Most people haven't read The Iliad or Action Comics #1 either. Or visited the Acropolis, or watched the moon landing. We don't preserve artifacts because most people will want to use them in the future. In fact, we can't know what the future will need or want to know about our time, which is why we preserve as much as possible.
And yet Poverty Row produced Detour, one of the best noirs ever made. The intentions aren’t the only thing that matter here; the art does.
Further, it’s not purely about entertainment value. I recently watched Les Vampires, a 1916 serial from France. It’s true that the theatrical conventions aren’t the ones we know today, but it was fascinating watching Louis Feuillade figure out how to make a thriller on the fly, and some of the ideas he came up with created our current theatrical conventions. That historical understanding is important.
Thats the most part - and to be honest, in my opinion, most of the best Film Noir was probably produced by Poverty Row - even Poverty Row's output post 1939 became much more relevant for modern audiences - like on average even a Poverty Row picture in the post war era had better production values (on whole) than an A picture from a major in 1933 - simply because the state of the art had moved so dramatically forward.
Incidentally one of my favorite Noir's is He Walked by Night featuring a very very young Jack Webb. I'll check out Detour though.
> Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades
That doesn't matter though. I find silent movies interesting simply because of their age. It's a window into how people lived back then. Compare what's in the homes of the "average person" in a silent film to what you see in one of today's movies.
Is it? Often the people featured in films were.. basically only the wealthy classes. We have ample example of how they lived.
Also, often movies today do not depict an average person, they depict an idealized version of that. We have stills of the real thing, lots of them.
Bear in mind I'm not arguing against preservation - but its a limited resource, I'd prioritize early home movies and industrial films (what little there was) over the traditional A or B picture studio output.
There's not much from the 90s at all really. While some stuff is there, most of the stuff I remember from the 90s isn't on archive.org and probably nowhere else, except maybe in someones old hard drives or floppy disks at the bottom of a drawer.
The main geocities-alike web host I used around IIRC 1998-2001 is just gone, as far as I can tell. I think it was called spree.com. The spaces were intended to be used by some kind of sales affiliates, I think, but were de facto just little ad-free (unlike other hosts) web spaces with a decent amount of storage (a few MB, I think?). I wasn't the only one just using it as free web hosting.
I've tried a couple times, and can find no record of the service ever having existed, let alone any of the content that was on it (mine, or any other).
And Usenet is pretty fragmentary as well and, even among what was preserved, I don't know how accessible what archives there are as they went via Dejanews and then Google Groups.
Of course, there's also a huge amount of information about companies, products, news, etc. that was largely never in electronic form and--where it didn't just get tossed in the trash in the wake of some corporate buyout--is in the stacks of some library someplace.
This isn't that much different from the rate at which stuff comes up in my modest set of Youtube subscriptions. And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant? And yet! 100 years from now they'll lament that so much of today's pop culture has simply been lost to random deletion or bit rot.
Already the link rot on youtube is significant. Very often I will find links like "listen to this music it's good", you go to youtube and not even the metadata is left, it's just an error page so you have no idea what it even was.
I know YouTube will throw a video to an extremely slow archival hard disk where getting 720p requires waiting a few minutes for YT to (presumably) move it to some regular storage tier with reasonable write speeds. But I've never heard of there being rot on the actual data YT stores, and I imagine it's on the same policy as Drive files where they're globally redundant, or at least in two different DCs.
> And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant?
In some cases you won't know until decades later, when one of those videos becomes "lost media" and people start looking for it.
That's why, as long as people are willing to buy hard drives to store everything, we should let them save as much as they want for the future. Because you never know.
The first job of my professional career was at the Library of Congress in the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound Division working to digitize things like this.
First, it was a fascinating job because of how media has been stored over time. Most people think of records or even phonographs but there are wax cylinders, wire spool recordings, and a ton more. Unfortunately, many of them are so degraded that you couldn't play them.
It wasn't later that they came up with the turning images to sound approach but we captured many of those original pictures.
Second, the sheer volume of stuff was nuts. The Library had warehouses of uncatalogued things sitting around without a real plan to log them, let alone digitize them.
While we had Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, the more fascinating thing about those is that copyright law at the time didn't have a way to address "moving pictures" so they did the only thing they could: copyrights on each individual frame. Yes, seriously. Luckily, at that point, it was only 15fps and movies were short.
Edison's work got all the attention but there were tons more like the ones in this article that were simply lost to time.
It's not just century-old movies, many much more recent movies which were available on DVD are almost impossible to find now that everything is to the whim of streamers and online services.
> A more immediate way of getting some action would be to talk to some of the directors with films on the list and encourage them to get their movies released digitally. Ron Howard and James Cameron are obvious candidates.
Interesting side note: a couple of years back, I wanted to buy The Abyss on blu-ray. When I went to look, all I could find were DVD versions and a crappy fake blu-ray version where someone had just ripped a DVD and transferred it to blu-ray (seriously).
After a bit of digging, I came to find out that there is no blu-ray version of The Abyss because (basically) Cameron has been holding it up. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with him wanting to oversee it personally, yet simultaneously never bothering to actually bother to get it done.
Looked again just now and supposedly the work has finally been done (?) and it was to be available last month, yet as of right now it's not available on amazon, so who knows..
I've been hoping for the 4K remaster to be finished and end up in theatres, hopefully as a nice director's cut and maybe even in an old school non-widescreen IMAX theatre. I remember 20 years ago being so excited to buy and watch a 4:3 DVD of The Abyss. It was right around the time that widescreen was equated to "good", but The Abyss was shot in 4:3 and it was a rare case where the widescreen version was the "pan and scan" version.
Highly recommend the documentary about shooting the film if you're a fan[1]. It's a film that could never be made in the same way today. The rat breathing an oxygen rich liquid scene was real (not saying this is a good thing) and the stuntwork of actors was even more dangerous.
Is it though? To me, it seems much more to the whim of the content owners. If they choose to not make it available to the streamers, then it's not the streamer's fault for not having it.
Even worse is that we have music labels intentionally and methodically destroying generations' worth of music with dynamic compression, making despicable "remasters" the only thing available to modern listeners. What happens to the originals? Is anyone tracking their provenance?
Readit News
Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.
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).
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.
Dead Comment
> 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.
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.
Sure but it will probably lead to the same thing happening again.
Piracy is a violent crime, file sharing is not comparable to it in any way.
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.
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
Not too hard to find, but a beautiful animation of a human struggling yo walk home on the moon… you’ll love it
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.
Copyright lasts 70 years past the death of the author. I assure you, you will not own that chair after you die.
Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct. No will, and the decision is made by the probate court. No heirs? Then your chair does go to the state. Or maybe it gets left on the street to be taken by any member of the public who sees it and happens to want it.
Intellectual property in the end is really not that different from any other kind of property. Like any form of property, it's a social construct that exists because people think and act like it exists, and because the resources of the state are used to ensure that any dissenters are suppressed and/or punished.
Ultimately, the reason that your chair sits in your living room, rather than in your better-armed or more muscular neighbor's fireplace, is the same reason that you can't sell bootleg copies of the latest Disney movie on Amazon: the voluntary observation and enforcement of the law by human beings.
In that owning a patent doesn't even give you the right to make the invention described, it only allows you to prevent others from making it.
Especially true if you patent an improvement of someone else's patented invention.
Your patent isn't license to infringe on theirs.
But you can prevent them from using that improvement without having licensed your patent.
Although copyright and trademark are slightly different beasts.
How is "I own this text" less arbitrary than "I own this forest"? You can't "own" a forest, you can only prevent other people from entering it but if the forest is large enough you can't even do so on your own, even if you live in the forest.
Heck, while you might "own" a chair, how do you "own" a million chairs? You can't use a million chairs. You can't even store a million chairs in one place. You certainly can't guard them yourself, much like the forest.
And how do you "own" a business? How do you "own" the factory when you're not even using it, nor would be able to do so yourself and instead you have to pay dozens of people to use it for you?
"Property" literally just means "exclusive claim backed up by force". That's the primary function of the state, it's why we have police.
My view is that we should build a system that ensures every person gets to eat (and have shelter, medical care, other necessities) without the need to pay for it, simply because this is the right thing to do.
Then under such a system, we can eliminate intellectual property restrictions, because they will no longer be necessary to ensure that artists eat. IP restrictions actually slow down innovation, so eliminating them will have huge benefits to society.
By the way you can ensure that everyone gets fed etc without paying for it by building an economy where everyone is part owner of the productive machinery they depend upon. Then no one is poor. Creating an economy where a preponderance of the firms are cooperatives is a good start. So this can be done in a traditionally libertarian way, without high taxes or strong government intervention.
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).
The staffer who wrote that was fired.
[1] https://archive.org/details/RscThreeMythsAboutCopyrightLaw/
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Things from the 80s are permanently lost simply because no one bothered to preserve copies of them.
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.
1. Keep buying new things.
2. Pay through the nose for rare old cultural artifacts.
Meanwhile copyright protection is required to encourage creative people to make things
(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.)
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Much more of the post-1927 content was preserved (more of it was preserved with sound once we switched to sound on film) - I'd note however that Silent Movies are virtually unrecognizable by modern viewers as being even the same art form as sound pictures - and sound movies didnt reach the same... production values? as the silents until 1936-37.
The period between 1927-and 1937 was a period of reinvention and learning of a new medium, which is why - my general take is the golden age of Hollywood was 1939 to 1959.
Consider what films came out in 1939 -
* Gone with the Wind
* Wizard of Oz
* Mr. Smith goes to Washington
These are films that still find audiences today, now - 80 years or so on.
Most Americans might have seen one movie produced between 1927 and 1938 - but most people who are above 30 have seen at least two those three movies at least once.
And that trend continues from there on - where 1940 to 1959, most americans have seen one movie released in each of those years.
So while I dont disagree that we are losing heritage in these things - I take issue with their definition of Golden Age and the idea that there is value in saving everything ever written or filmed.
Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades, it was meant to be ephemeral topical entertainment, and functionally intended to be disposable. Most of the production of Poverty Row, and B pictures by the majors are like this, they were intended for Block Booking, and largely just as a way to fill the content needs of the theaters and as a way to provide steady revenue in the event an A picture flopped.
But you're cutoff leaves to the "Dark Ages" the films Frankenstein (1931), Love Me Tonight (1931), 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), King Kong (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), The Thin Man (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to name a few.
While I do not deny that movies of that era are often highly influential on later films, they do not lend themselves to modern watchability, because of the technical limitations of the medium at the time. Snow White being a notable exception because it was the literal first of its kind, and Disney has successfully restored and rereleased it decade after decade.
Largely I'm a believer that the merits of the film itself will lead to its preservation and often restoration and that preservation just for the sake of preservation isn't all that valuable a use of a limited resource.
As with Pompeii graffiti and warehouse cuneiform tally tablets, from the anthropological perspective, the ephemeral is interesting.
Old entertainment that seems alien has a lot to offer for understanding culture that was.
It's only interesting after a looong period were it was very much uninteresting, causing so much to be destroyed until what remained became interesting as a rarity.
I think it's very likely that process of destruction is necessary to make past ephemera valuable.
The costs to try to save all of it are vast - the costs to try to save some of it are pretty reasonable. What's interesting is what has survived from the 20's was mostly by accident.
In general, as I understand it, silent films were lost primarily for two reasons:
A) The film medium of the time was nitrocellulose, which unfortunately is highly flammable (several films were lost to vault fires) as well as being susceptible to decomposition.
B) With "talkies" becoming the dominant form after the late 1920s, the silver content in some of the old silent films was seen as being more valuable than the actual content. In other cases I think films were just dumped, being seen as not having any value and worth the storage costs anymore.
Television underwent a similar phenomenon from the beginning until the 1970s-1980s, due to videotape being expensive and reusable, and older material being seen as not economically valuable (especially after the transition from black and white to color). Doctor Who is probably the most famous example of a serial with missing episodes, but my understanding is that more rigorous archiving was not the norm for entertainment seen as more "disposable" (eg game shows, news programs) well after television companies archived their prime time programs.
Also, the fact that people have not seen a lot of movies from before 1939 does not argue that they should not be preserved. Most people haven't read The Iliad or Action Comics #1 either. Or visited the Acropolis, or watched the moon landing. We don't preserve artifacts because most people will want to use them in the future. In fact, we can't know what the future will need or want to know about our time, which is why we preserve as much as possible.
Further, it’s not purely about entertainment value. I recently watched Les Vampires, a 1916 serial from France. It’s true that the theatrical conventions aren’t the ones we know today, but it was fascinating watching Louis Feuillade figure out how to make a thriller on the fly, and some of the ideas he came up with created our current theatrical conventions. That historical understanding is important.
Incidentally one of my favorite Noir's is He Walked by Night featuring a very very young Jack Webb. I'll check out Detour though.
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That doesn't matter though. I find silent movies interesting simply because of their age. It's a window into how people lived back then. Compare what's in the homes of the "average person" in a silent film to what you see in one of today's movies.
Also, often movies today do not depict an average person, they depict an idealized version of that. We have stills of the real thing, lots of them.
Bear in mind I'm not arguing against preservation - but its a limited resource, I'd prioritize early home movies and industrial films (what little there was) over the traditional A or B picture studio output.
Although there is not much of an archive of before 1996/1995 (it's lost)
I've tried a couple times, and can find no record of the service ever having existed, let alone any of the content that was on it (mine, or any other).
http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html
Of course, there's also a huge amount of information about companies, products, news, etc. that was largely never in electronic form and--where it didn't just get tossed in the trash in the wake of some corporate buyout--is in the stacks of some library someplace.
This isn't that much different from the rate at which stuff comes up in my modest set of Youtube subscriptions. And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant? And yet! 100 years from now they'll lament that so much of today's pop culture has simply been lost to random deletion or bit rot.
I'll intentionally duplicate playlist entries (two different uploaders) as a buffer against rot.
In some cases you won't know until decades later, when one of those videos becomes "lost media" and people start looking for it.
That's why, as long as people are willing to buy hard drives to store everything, we should let them save as much as they want for the future. Because you never know.
Otherwise, there is too much content for anyone to view.
First, it was a fascinating job because of how media has been stored over time. Most people think of records or even phonographs but there are wax cylinders, wire spool recordings, and a ton more. Unfortunately, many of them are so degraded that you couldn't play them.
It wasn't later that they came up with the turning images to sound approach but we captured many of those original pictures.
Second, the sheer volume of stuff was nuts. The Library had warehouses of uncatalogued things sitting around without a real plan to log them, let alone digitize them.
While we had Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, the more fascinating thing about those is that copyright law at the time didn't have a way to address "moving pictures" so they did the only thing they could: copyrights on each individual frame. Yes, seriously. Luckily, at that point, it was only 15fps and movies were short.
Edison's work got all the attention but there were tons more like the ones in this article that were simply lost to time.
Here are some examples: https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies
Interesting side note: a couple of years back, I wanted to buy The Abyss on blu-ray. When I went to look, all I could find were DVD versions and a crappy fake blu-ray version where someone had just ripped a DVD and transferred it to blu-ray (seriously).
After a bit of digging, I came to find out that there is no blu-ray version of The Abyss because (basically) Cameron has been holding it up. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with him wanting to oversee it personally, yet simultaneously never bothering to actually bother to get it done.
Looked again just now and supposedly the work has finally been done (?) and it was to be available last month, yet as of right now it's not available on amazon, so who knows..
Highly recommend the documentary about shooting the film if you're a fan[1]. It's a film that could never be made in the same way today. The rat breathing an oxygen rich liquid scene was real (not saying this is a good thing) and the stuntwork of actors was even more dangerous.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YctOKgWVn9E
Is it though? To me, it seems much more to the whim of the content owners. If they choose to not make it available to the streamers, then it's not the streamer's fault for not having it.
Even worse is that we have music labels intentionally and methodically destroying generations' worth of music with dynamic compression, making despicable "remasters" the only thing available to modern listeners. What happens to the originals? Is anyone tracking their provenance?