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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!
Don't worry, there'll be a torrent ;)
The slashdot article "How To Verify CD-R Data Retention Over Time?" covered this a LONG time ago...
If you're referencing personal preservation rights then you should read this article from the Standford Libraries on copyright and fairuse.
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.
Since CDs have Reed-Solomon and parity for error correction, and even if samples fail the player will interpolate, you can have a pretty ruined disk before it won't play anymore. It is all or nothing once it starts to fail though-- at the point the interpolation can no longer repair a dirty section, the CD will simply drop out.
I also recently (yesterday actually!) opened an old DVD+R (with an HFS volume) from 2002 and rearchived it to a new DVD. It still read perfectly, but it's been stored in a cool dark place, and has been mounted maybe 10 times.
I agree
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.
There are some difficulties in classifying that have become more prominent in recent decades. Authors put lies or obvious fictions in what are nominally non-fiction books, such as Bill Bryson's travelog "A Walk In the Woods". In the other direction, large sections of Frederick Forsyth's books, nominally fiction, are detailed and insightful descriptions of current events. What's a classifier to do?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
But will Memorex still be there in 300 years, to sue them if their claim proved false?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Over here it is next month!
Salt would be good to keep moisture down.
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?