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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).
> 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.
Sadly pirates are a critical piece of media preservation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Someone's gunna lose the private key for all that DRM media and then whoops.
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.
>
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
Copyright does not inhibit archiving. The problems begin when people want to distribute those archives.
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.)
It is not illegal to own and preserve media which is still under copyright. IP is not the problem, the problem is nobody cared until it was too late.
This is what capitalism would have happen to the bulk of culture.
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.
Without archive.org we could say the very same about the Internet.
Although there is not much of an archive of before 1996/1995 (it's lost)
A release rate of three per day (overall)!
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.
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.
Well I thought the Golden Age was the 30s and 40s, not the Silent Era. But sad to hear many of those old pictures are gone.
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.
Here are some examples: https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies
It's still happening. Remember the Universal Music fire? The scope of the damage from that is still a subject of debate: https://variety.com/2020/music/news/universal-music-fire-arc...
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?
I was already familiar with the perils of nitrate, but I never knew distribution patterns were such a big factor in the loss of vintage films.
I have some memories of the concept of "second-run" theaters growing up, but I had no idea there was once such a long-tail network of nth-run cinemas that the total number of prints in distribution would need only be a fraction of modern releases.
There's a lot of dismissive posts in this thread, and I think some people are missing an issue here.
When documenting the history of anything, it's rarely a bad thing to have a lot of data. Here, the preservation of these films is a documentation of history. When we talk about the art form of film, we see the giants and then work backwards. How much has Spielberg, for example, benefitted from being able to watch Kurosawa? Who influenced Kurosawa? Who influenced the people who influenced Kurosawa? Yeah, it's a bit like counting turtles, but since when has adding granularity to our knowledge-base ever been a bad thing? If it turns out that Kurosawa didn't create a technique because someone else did it first, that doesn't matter, because he still did something that synthesized it into something special. Even the giants stood on shoulders.
A 25% retention rate is pretty good compared to the 4000 years of culture that preceded it. Who was the best King Lear in 1842? What made their performance special?
Nearly everything I remember as a cultural artifact from the 80s and 90s is gone, except for movies and video games, both of which have been preserved only due to illegal copyright infringement. Nearly every aspect of my online presence and the people who influenced my formative years, things like the local dial-in BBS, some of the Usenet groups, and the many MUDs are all gone, poof, vanished.
I imagine more of human culture has been lost than preserved at nearly every point in history, but as with other commenters, I expect online culture in particular will be lost to memory due to the folly of US copyright law, the US global hegemony (primarily focused on enforcing said laws), and the US being a lynchpin to the early Internet.
Many TV stations would reuse tapes leading to many shows getting lost as well. The BBC routinely deleted content until it changed its archiving policy in 1978. Until then thousands of hours of programming in all genres was deleted.
That’s odd- the first film mentioned by this article (Ben-Hur from 1925), which it describes as completely lost, is not lost, at least according to its wikipedia article. Apparently it was (at least) partly considered lost until being found again in the 80’s. Not sure whether to trust TFA on any other claims now.
MoMA's film library (created in 1935, moved to a special facility in the 90s) now reports that it has 30,000 films in its vaults - including "the Museum’s holdings of 5,000 fragile nitrate films, dating from 1894 to 1951..."
https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/film-preservation...
It's fine, Sturgeon's law applies to this just as it applies everything else.
you don't need to keep everything, there does not need to be a frantic effort to obsessively horde every single thing ever created, things get lost, room is made for new things to be made.
You do however want to make an effort to save the 10 percent of things that are actually any good.
MySpace Music can be used as another example,
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/b2381s/myspace_...
Going by the nature of what art has been preserved from the past, I am convinced that what is preserved is likely either to be religious or porn.
Thus, 500 years from now the works they are most likely to know about from this era will be The Passion the Christ and Kim Kardashian’s tape.
It's amazing how literally every major copyright proponent doesn't really care about the things that actually make copyright possible - the actual works themselves. Time and time again, they've shown disrespect for authors and creators when they treat works as a means to an end. They're not in it for the art of it, they're in it for the money of it.
This has been happening for almost a century at this point, just in the realm of moving pictures. Never forget the entire Dumont library being dumped in the upper New York Bay just because they didn't want to store them.
According to this tome
http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html
it was not "films seen as art" that started the preservation wave in the 1980s but the introduction of home video which meant that a movie like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939_film)
was suddenly worth millions again.
And yet "reaction" videos with someone stealing content and looking bored in the bottom left of your screen will still be available for everyone for the ages to come.
I recommend watching Decasia by Bill Morrison
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decasia
The film is a meditation on old, decaying silent films, featuring segments of earlier movies re-edited and integrated into a new narrative. Critic Glen Kenny described Decasia as an "abstract narrative about mortality in all of its manifestations."What percentage of generational histories and educational or simply entertaining stories from the, let's just narrow it down to the indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest, have been lost due to disease and colonialism?
How far back did some of those stories go, how many thousands of years?
The lost Hollywood stories are just variations of archetypical tales presented in a different medium, sometimes superbly. Moving pictures were certainly novel, at the time, but in the context of tens of thousands of years of human existence I find that I don't really care.
Up-triangle'd anyway, for those who do care, and because it's a story about stories.
Why not pray to the AI to bring it back? /s
Copyright (and thus Disney) to thank for it.
when did silent films start be called “silent” films
since they were the only kind of film for a very long time
Should have been less restrictive about ip, I guess.
What makes it the golden age? I’d much rather have Raiders of the Lost Ark than Metropolis.
Is it really a big deal that some really old movies are lost ... sorry but I just don't see why ...
I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.
Forgetting is also a gift - it is is foolish to think that you have to preserve everything.
I think it is a much bigger problem that too much of today's photos and videos are preserved.
Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset.
The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.