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Preserving the Sound of America
jonerik writes "The Associated Press (by way of MSNBC) has this article on the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry, which 'seeks to ensure even greater protection for some of the most notable songs, speeches and other utterances.' To that end, the library's extensive collection of recordings and photos will soon be moved to a massive 41-acre complex built into the side of a mountain in Culpeper, Virginia. When construction on the site is completed - in about three years - anything stored in Culpeper should be available via computer at the library's Madison Building on Capitol Hill. The Library of Congress has been collecting recordings for almost 100 years, the first being a recording of a speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II. Since then the library has collected recorded speeches by every American President since Theodore Roosevelt, oral histories, music, radio broadcasts, and other examples of recorded sound." This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections.
Like they say, 90% of everything is crap. However, the 10% of good stuff differs from person to person :-)
Store recordings in a fortress, and you'll preserve them for 100 years.
Digitalize and upload them, and they'll live as long as you have a running server.
Besides, a recording is more useful on the net than in a mountain.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
Federal law requires that any copyrighted sound must be stored at the library.
Is this the same government who has been busy giving god-like status to content creators? I can just see somebody suing the LoC to keep their content away from eyes/ears who aren't paying for it. But of course, they may let it slide if they put DRM on the content. Maybe. If they're in a good mood. Oh, but wait....
"We have every format you can imagine and every problem with every format," said Michael Taft, who helps run the program. "What we have to do is find a way of taking sound off of all of these different media and storing them as computer files in such a way that they will be readable and accessible not just today, but 100, 200 years from now."
"I'm sorry sir, but that part of history has been lost due to money grubbing companies who revoked our playback key (or they went out of business, the timed key is lost because it can no longer be renewed, and nobody knows what format the file is stored in), and the guy who tried to crack the file is currently serving a 500 year prison term for attempted circumvention. Have a nice day!"
-R
I respect your distrust of government, but in this case let me assure that the meaning of "protection" is to protect these works of art from deteriorating. The copyright office in the Library of Congress acts to respect the law, of course, but if the master copies of films acidify, there is nothing left to protect.
For what it is worth, while selecting media formats for preserving audio and film an effort is made to avoid DRM because it can inhibit the ability to migrate the data to newer formats. The people working to convert analog recordings to digital archives are foremost interested in protecting the work from being lost forever. It can only sit on a shelf for so long and it is hoped that a digital, lossless copying method, will protect/preserve the artistic value.
(disclaimer: I work on this project at the Library of Congress)
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Not sure why that was modded funny, though I suppose there is some sweet irony there. But rarely does anyone talk about the value of p2p as an archive. In the heyday of napster I downloaded a bunch of speeches, stuff that wasn't easy to find, black nationalist stuff from the 60s, moon landing recordings, lectures, and so forth. But I rarely see that kind of stuff on gnutella when I look for it, and I wish it was still there. When I look for music, it's always easy to find the popular stuff, but I rarely find much of the more obscure stuff I want to find. It's ironic that the death of napster didn't stop what the RIAA wanted stopped - the large-scale trading of their big selling hits - but it did stop the more legitimate use of p2p to give people access to a relatively comprehensive archive of information. It's disgraceful that the RIAA's greed and inflated sense of self-importance would stand in the way of such a significant advancement in the human sciences. And it's pathetic that the rest of the human species is enabling what amounts to the wholesale theft of human history and culture! In ancient times, great advances in knowledge were stopped by the forces of irrationality and superstition. Today we look back and chuckle about how primitive we were then. But today we do the same thing, vilifying our visionaries as thieves instead of heretics. And we do it to mollify greed and ego rather than superstition.
On a side note, I think the ego thing is huge for the RIAA and their cohorts. Their arrogance is megalomaniacal! I mean come on, RIAA, I don't want to download your precious britney spears crap that you spend the rest of your time shoving down my throat anyway. If I wanted that shit I could go to a freakin record store. And it's not like I can't hear it for free on the radio!
No, the beauty and significance of Napster in its prime -- a truly unfettered p2p network -- was not that kids could get for free the stuff that they continued to spend millions on through t-shirts, concerts, etc. It was the fact that at any time, you could be in a conversation about the blues and mention Ethyl Waters or Ida Fox, and you were just a few clicks away from being able to actually listen to the songs you probably wouldn't even be able to find at a record store if you tried. Imagine being able to do that with the library of congress! Or all of film history! Yes, it's true, the entertainment companies will no longer be able to rely on big multimillion dollar stars in order to retain their domination of public consciousness, but is that a bad thing? Think about it.