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Copyrights and CD-Rs Endanger Audio History
SEWilco writes "A study by the Library of Congress has found that many audio recordings are being lost due to copyright restrictions and temporary media. Old audio recordings are protected by a various US state copyrights, so it's hard for preservationists to get and copy material. Recent data is threatened by being put on writable CDs, because CD-Rs begin to lose data after a few years, so recordings from as recently as 9/11 and the 2008 elections are already at risk."
We will be a mystery to archaeologists of the future.
Rip those CDs, create a torrent, and share that torrent on thelibarianbay.org. Problem solved!
I have some optical media that's from ~2001. Most of it's just fine, even after a tortured life. I trust high quality optical media more than anything else.
CDs are rarely an all-or-nothing affair. Even if you do lose data, you tend to not lose it all in one freak accident, not to mention solid state and magnetic media make fantastic paperweights after a solar storm.
The government must be using this as an excuse to destroy evidences on 9/11.
Don't worry, there'll be a torrent ;)
Does not the Library of Congress make it a habit to acquire as much of this kind of material as possible? Isn't seen as a mark of success to have your recordings in the LOC?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The slashdot article "How To Verify CD-R Data Retention Over Time?" covered this a LONG time ago...
Were CD-Rs the things we used before floppy disks, but after mercury delay lines, or have I got the order wrong? They were those black things with a a paper label in the middle, yes?
Jesus Christ, that was just last month!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
If you're referencing personal preservation rights then you should read this article from the Standford Libraries on copyright and fairuse.
Considering the declining IQ of the USA, all that history stuff is superfluous anyway...
For longevity, current backup systems are just silly. They are simply just not abstracted enough. For REAL archival what's needed is an active system like the Internet but one that guarantees n redundancy. Perhaps a p2p like system with nodes backing up files. This abstracts away whether they are going on SATA, IDE, SCSI, Tape, whatevs. The local machine handles all the hardware details. When newer, better, cheaper technology comes along, the old data is automatically able to propagate onto the new storage mechanisms. I see this all the time working in the IT industry. I have backups from 10 years ago I can not read because we no longer have a working tape drive to read it. We need to separate ourselves from the hardware.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
This is kind of funny.
I warned people about depending on floppy disks for long term storage. After a few years, the media degrades and the data is impossible to retrieve. They didn't listen until they went back to floppies from years ago that no longer work.
I warned people that home recordable CD's and DVD's had a shelf life of less than 10 years after they were burnt. I've seen CD's burnt, verified, and then put away in a good climate controlled environment, where a few years later they couldn't be read. For those who have listened to me, I've told them, make at least two copies, in different places, (like their hard drive and a CD), and burn new disks once a year. It sucks to have years of research on something, just to find the old information is lost.
This isn't exactly news, but every so often someone finds out, writes a story, and it makes the news again.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I don't know what the big deal is with CD-Rs. I mean I have some CD-Rs still around for some reason from the late 90s/early 00s that I haven't gone out of my way to treat particularly well (just a normal CD wallet or sandwiched in a spindle) and they all seem to be perfectly readable as the day I burned them. Am I missing something here? Did I just get lucky?
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
Fit on the head of a pin? At least that's all I remember when I whenever Isee a museum exhibit about the history of computing power. I'm sure we can dig up a few pinheads along with a couple of redundant pinheads to preserve all of this data.
People still use CD-Rs? I just download all my audio data straight through amazon or whatever.
Memorex claims 300 year life for their fancy (expensive) archival CD-R and 100 years for DVD-R.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/sections/reviews/specific.aspx?articleid=17324
Take that with a grain of salt, of course.
what was good enough for the egyptians is good enough for me. heck, the rosetta stone is still readable with present day technology......
I have some optical media that's from ~2001. Most of it's just fine, even after a tortured life. I trust high quality optical media more than anything else.
Multiple copies on multiple media that is easy to transfer, and transfer them often. Nothing else will work for a human lifetime. For my family photos it's hard drives (multiple) and every couple of years I make a fresh copy or two (and don't throw away the old ones). I even keep copies off site. CDs and music, I couldn't care less about. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that to me none of it matters, but if it did I'd do the same thing. The thing that makes optical copies so insidious is that if you gather a large enough collection together it becomes very difficult to transfer them. You end up shuffling disks for months. No thanks. Only some of my oldest copies are on optical media.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I have CD-R's dating from when I bought my first drive, back in 97, if you take care of them, like put them in their cases when done, and in a dark place (like a book shelf, binder, or cd rack)
how are the 2008 elections being lost and yet I still have voodoo 2 drivers and a windows 95 bootleg?
What about DVD-Rs? Kept in spindles??
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It is essential to the people who will sell us our culture in the future that we forget all that has gone before. If we remembered our heritage it would be necesary to innovate new things. If we can't, then recycled things will suffice - which cuts down the production cost.
The goal therefore of the media giants is to make us nye culturne. A people devoid of culture. They're having great success at this.
An opposing project would be Musopen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That's like, forever, man.
Kid, the Library of Congress was founded in 1800 - longer ago than your grandfather's grandfather's dad could remember. 210 years ago. Most of the stuff they had then, they still have now. They're not worried about preserving the top40 from your middle school days until you're disrespecting it in college. They want to be the repository for our culture forever. They're sort of like preemptive anthropologists and archaeologists. They know that you don't care but they're expecting that someone, someday will because cultural sensitivity is a cyclical thing.
It's customary that new generations forget what has gone before and then rediscover it as if it were a new thing. This forgetting is not required. If we can quit forgetting then artists can stand on the shoulders of giants once again and build things of great and complex beauty like they once did.
Given the current state of copyright though, you can't whistle any four notes in a row in public without getting sued. Anything like a symphony is right out.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think a lot of video games will be lost for the next generations, too. With Steam, Online Activations, DRM and the law that forbids to circumvent this. I think this century will be called "the dark ages", which a copyright of 100 years, the generations will not be able to use our music. If it wasn't for P2P, Torrent and Youtube there would be a cultural vacuum.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
This is why "rebooting" modern society will not be practical, following a world-wide catastrophe.
The discussion thus far: civvies use CD-R's and businesses use tape.
...HOWEVER...
As a new professional to the field, I am unsure what I should be recommending to my family and friends. CD's and even DVD's aren't bad options, but their size becomes problematic when storing volumes of family photographs and video, in addition to the personal detritus of an online presence: funny photos, music, recipes, chat logs, etc. Tape is noted for its capacity, and longevity under the correct circumstances, but is expensive and susceptible to the same troubles as cassettes. I have also used active hard drives, but have found trying to keep data long-term on a spinning disk is just begging for a head-crash. Flash media is expensive, of limited size, and untested in long-term storage (I have lost most of my data stored on early flash drives).
So, what do I recommend to my family and friends? Should I continue to recommend quality CD's, DVD's, and correct storage procedures? Should I set up a http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ (with a RAID setup) like service for them and be prepared to transfer files to a new system every 7-10 years? What do I do about changing file types?
Recordings from last November are already at risk? They can't be very high quality CD-Rs then as that's less than a year ago.
Its only likely to happen if you buy bad media. This is why I wrote this guide so people don't continually blame CDs for their own error. Oh, and its been featured on Slashdot's front page... twice.
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || http://AdTerrasPerAspera.com
There was a discussion on this a few years ago here, and it was quickly determined that 78 rpm Acetate is the way to go for archival media
It's worked for over 80 years for some early phonographs
Previous generations weren't even trying to preserve anything. Plenty of stuff will make it to the future; it only needs one copy of a CD or whatever to survive
I am trolling
All my archived family photo's are stored with 100% redundancy PAR files
At least you had the controller to get an idea what to hook the drive up to to make it work. That might give you a better idea if it was formatted RLL or MFM. After you get the drive hooked up with a replacement controller, then there's the challenge of determining the interleave and inputting the bad sector table (hopefully no more were added that weren't printed on the drive).
The problem would then be how to transfer the data off the computer, mount the drive in something else, etc. At least storing the ultimate data wouldn't be a problem, I could back up 1000 of these hard drives on my keychain fob.
You might actually find someone that can restore that data, but yes, there are many 'techs' that wouldn't immediately disqualify themselves from touching one of these and would destroy the disk data in attempting. Then try giving a Geek Squad tech a 9-track tape to back up if you really want to see a head explode (and those can be used in modern operating systems too).
...were people still proportionally this freaked by Pearl Harbor in the 1950's?
Hell sonny, I was in Pearl in 1950! I was the Engineer's Mate on PT-73: otherwise know as the USS Jack Kennedy at the time.
*wheezes, and hitches pants up above socks as eyes glaze over*
Eh? Who are you, again?
On a more serious note, my maternal grand mother still held a grudge against the Japanese from WW2 up into the 1980's when she died.
She claimed one of her brothers was a POW, and getting back stateside after release, he died from eating his first 'decent' meal since being a POW.
To more precisely answer your question, I would say that if you rounded up a pool of the U.S.A. public from that era, you would get a wide range of answers.
Look at more recent examples that have a bigger pool of data:
Korean War
Vietnam War
Panama
New Grenada
1st Iraqi war(Kuwait)
Murray Bldg. in Oklahoma
and numerous 'terrorist attacks', both foreign and domestic since the 1950's, cont. on until present
9/11
'War on Terror'...ongoing
Afghanistan...ongoing
2nd Iraqi war...ongoing
The current debate and fury over the mosque in NYC...ongoing
Pick your poison.
Assuming I 'got the drift' of your comment, if I were you I'd concentrate on 9/11, Afghanistan War, 2nd Iraqi War, the 'War on Terror', and the mosque debate for your answers.
My impression is that we are just as vindictive AND apathetic now as they were then, sadly.
My experience has supported this opinion, but I may be biased too...YMMV.
BTW, I'm 52, soon to be 53 years old. /. UID, but I did watch too much "McHale's Navy" in my younger days!
I 'lurked' here quite a while before I got my
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
So we have a copyright which prohibits us to use an artist work for ever longer times, and when that copyright actually expires (when my grand-children are old or even later) we can't use it because it simply "rotted away" ?
Hows that for getting the short end of the deal. My, it almost feels like I'm being ripped off ...
So where is the (completely legal under US law) software that the Library of Congress can use to back up Blu-Rays that have been released recently?
It's called the analog hole, and the MPAA has endorsed it.
I just download all my audio data straight through amazon or whatever.
So once you've created audio data, I understand that you archive the files for the project in your Amazon S3 account. However, you still "bear sole responsibility for adequate security, protection and backup of Your Content" according to Amazon S3's TOS because Amazon could shut down your S3 account at any time when the bean-counters "determine that it is necessary or prudent to do so for legal or regulatory reasons," that is, when laws change such that S3 can no longer make a profit.
Most of my old 1.2MB 5.25" Floppies still read perfectly, but most of my old 1.44MB 3.5" floppies are completely unreadable. The 1.2s are much older. I assume the magnetic density must affect its stability. Or perhaps it is an inherent design flaw. Of course, it could be just the quality of the media too, but it seems independent of the brands.
Isn't it possible to look at the number of missing bits and guess at them to recover everything but where the bits are missing?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
They want to be the repository for our culture forever.
Yeah, right. I suggest reading the book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker. American libraries -- including the Library of Congress -- are apparently full of people who aren't interested in preserving knowledge, or if they are, are very bad at it in practice.
Given the current state of copyright though, you can't whistle any four notes in a row in public without getting sued. Anything like a symphony is right out.
Of course, with copyright maximalists like Marybeth Peters, who runs the US Copyright Office, a division of the Library of Congress, they're even compromising their own mission.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
You are correct about federal law. State copyright law is a very different kettle of snapping turtles with regards to audio copyrights. Due to weirdness in the way federal copyright law is constructed, audio recordings made before 1972 are not covered, and so federal copyright law does not preempt state law, and so audio works made prior to then are covered by state common law copyright. In most states, this affords protection until 2049. Some states passed anti-copying and other laws, making it a huge minefield to figure out what the exact legal status is.
There's an excellent paper explaining this available, if you want the details.
I forget what 8 was for.
We will be a mystery to archaeologists of the future.
No we won't, and I'm tired of hearing this trite assertion repeated as a truism. This is one of those things that has become a meme because it sounds plausible, but under analysis it's flawed because it (a) disregards the massive proliferation of digital data and (b) misapplies digital fragility.
To start off with, most artifacts and information from previous cultures have likely perished too. On top of this we're producing a staggering amount of information- or at least data- in general compared to previous generations.
It's true that any given piece of data stored on a given digital medium is arguably at higher risk of being lost. But this disregards the fact that there may easily be multiple copies of that information stored elsewhere.
However, the primary flaw is that it focuses on the fragility of any *specific* piece of digital information, e.g. that photo of your dog in a funny hat you have stored on a mouldering old CD-R is at serious risk of being lost forever. While that's true, it doesn't apply to this situation, because our future archaeologists or historians probably won't require specific pieces of information to have a decent idea of our culture- they'll merely require an adequately large arbitrary selection of such data to get a decent picture of who we were.
And because there's so much data out there, we could probably lose 99.999% of the stuff at random and it'd still probably be far easier to reconstruct our culture than those that have gone before.
So yeah, if one is worried about a particular hilarious photo of their dog, or any given film, or whatever... digital fragility is an issue. But using it to asssert that our culture is going to become a digital "black hole" to future generations is fundamentally flawed.
We will not disappear from history- at least not for those reasons.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
On that note, I was appalled at what I saw on the discard table at my university's library. Huge pile of old technical and research volumes, some dating to the mid-1800s. Outdated? Yeah. Often wrong? Sure. But a snapshot of the state of science at the time, which is itself a valuable historical resource.
We no longer believe in (most of) the gods and demons our ancestors did, but it's still culturally useful to have information on the beliefs of the era. We no longer practice the styles of government, the human sacrifices, and whatever else our ancestors did, but it's still valuable to know where we came from. Add more examples as the spirit moves you.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
We no longer practice ... the human sacrifices ... our ancestors did ...
That's what you think.
Short of carved writing on stone tablets (eg, the Behistun monument), the longest-lasting medium I can think of is printed paper. Libraries know how to archive it: it's called a book.
There are ways to take digital files and convert them to bitmaps (eg www.ollydbg.de/paperbak). You can print the bitmaps, and read them back reliably with a scanner. About 500K can fit on one page of paper, so a one-hour MP3 recording (about 60MB) would take up 30 sheets of paper. If printed on acid-free stock, this should last for centuries. The pages could be bound in a book, whose introduction would describe the encoding, and provide an algorithm to extract the data.
Why rely on currently-fashionable media like the chemical dyes in a CD-R when good old reliable natural-fiber materials like paper are known to last centuries?
Alejo Hausner
>
It's customary that new generations forget what has gone before and then rediscover it as if it were a new thing.
So there's still hope for my orange flares and tie-dyed purple-shirts?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I released my album like a long time ago and stuff, and I still haven't received my catalog code. hrmph
Eric
So buy it, scan it, and publish it online as your own work (properly attributed) in the public domain. Then it will live forever in archive.org. The Project Gutenberg folk may be interested in your scans and convert it to text.
If you find a period piece like this that's out of copyright and you don't save it, it's on you. You let it go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually that's a good suggestion, but the problem for me and most people is that each book is hugely time consuming to process, especially the mass of data in old technical books. Try working on a Distributed Proofreading project (even a simple text volume) for a while and you'll see what I mean.
http://www.pgdp.net/
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It's really not necessary to know or remember or record everything. Life goes on. Earth keeps spinning.
The question is of cost vs. benefit. Maybe the best solution is to invent a nuclear-powered robot into which you can dump anything at all which would automagically record for all posterity whatever you dump into it. That way you wouldn't have to waste humans' time and money to do it.
Infinitely accurate memory could be as much of a curse as a blessing. There's a tightrope to be walked between remembering and forgetting.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Okay... you have recording finite space. Which one do you keep -- Plato or Aristotle??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?