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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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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This is effectively what the error codes are for. On a raw level there's no such thing as a "missing bit," you either have a zero or a one, but error codes can tell you if it's the correct value or not. If enough of the data and redundant Reed-Solomon codes are on the media, the incorrect value can be corrected, and if there isn't enough, for small errors the player can interpolate. Because a Red Book CD carries a very specific kind of high redundancy data, PCM audio, the reader can then use various strategies to recover something that sounds remotely like what was their originally, if not exactly.
A big drawback of the "interpolation" scheme is that CDs can sound excellent and then suddenly start to fail catastrophically; with tapes and records they would slowly wear down over time, but CDs are much more all-or-nothing. A colleague was telling me recently about engineering sessions in the 80s and having to work with DASH machines, which were big 24 track digital audio tape machines, that used Reed-Solomon codes to allow you to edit the digital tape with razor blades. You had to remove the front panel if you wanted to see the LEDs for the error correction system, and you'd watch those very carefully over the course of the session to make sure these weren't working too hard, and if they were, you'd take the tape and run off a clone before you started having dropouts.
This is very different than a data CD-R -- data CDRs still have error correction and redundant data coding, but if these fail the original file will be corrupt, period, which is why, for added safety, you might create parfiles or something similar.
I guess the upshot of this is that CDs, as they currently operate, particularly CD-Rs but even glass masters, aren't such a hot medium for archival. The failure modes are too severe and can leave you with a moldy loaf instead of half a loaf.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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?
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