dagblog - Comments for "Hoarding, Archiving, and the Public Domain: Universal Vault Edition"

Also audio and video

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 21:26:30 +0000

Also audio and video compression have changed the game - you can get a watchable 2 hour movie (standard TV size) in 700Megabytes, so almost 3000 films (or 6000 hours of TV) on a 2 Terabyte disk. I think a CD compressed to MP3 is 60Mbytes, so 35,000 albums on a 2 Terabyte disk? (3500 for original quality). The big cost is time and a powerful machine to compress fast.

A lot of this discussion is

ocean-kat — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 18:03:51 +0000

In reply to Hoarding, Archiving, and the Public Domain: Universal Vault Edition

A lot of this discussion is out of my knowledge base so I can't really weigh in. But I can not believe that if much of this material was made available for preservation the money wouldn't have been found to preserve it. Surely money would have been found so that all the jazz artists' work would have been preserved. And at least the more popular rock/pop artists.

As a music lover and jazz lover, like you, I feel this loss keenly.

Not only that, since Citizen

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 17:51:09 +0000

In reply to hah. I'll remind you that

Not only that, since Citizen's United they're opaque people.

hah. I'll remind you that

artappraiser — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 16:27:05 +0000

In reply to Dr. Strangelove on taking

hah. I'll remind you that Mitt's on board with his corporations are people, too, my friend....

Of course if we think of

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 16:13:55 +0000

In reply to Thanks for responding.

Of course if we think of Kafka's works that almost got burned, and new AI-based pattern recognition or anomalies or other ways of searching that might identify something X or Y group might find precious among Petabytes of data when a novel is a few hundred kilobytes, we have to acknowledge a whole new ballgame.

Thanks for responding.

artappraiser — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 15:55:33 +0000

In reply to You know, AA, that's fair.

Thanks for responding.

I guess where my thoughts take me is this as regards the relationship with public domain: unfortunate as this reality might be, you can't interest the majority in taking care of physical objects if most assign no monetary value to them at all. The concept of "sentimental value" is: one man's sentiment, another's garbage. Ironically, taking care of such things is an elite, educated thing, so one has to depend on elites to fund caretaking, not say, taxes.

This applies across the board, whoever owns something, public, corporate or private. I.E., the high monetary value makes them care that that Picasso in their public museum is taken care of, even if they think their kid could paint it just as well. If it's got high monetary value, they will not kvetch about money spent to protect it. Many don't care as much about Aunt Nellie's letter that reflects the times nor, say, music that is no longer popular.

Dr. Strangelove on taking

NCD — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 15:39:28 +0000

In reply to You know, AA, that's fair.

Dr. Strangelove on taking private property from corporations..!!

You know, AA, that's fair.

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 02:57:23 +0000

In reply to I dunno doc, after having a

You know, AA, that's fair. And certainly, intellectual property is not the only issue here. (And yes, libraries are also subject to disasters. But I'm spending my days in a the rare books room at the University of Texas right now, and the objects around here seem carefully preserved and protected.)

There are a lot of daunting challenges in historic preservation, and there's never enough money, and getting the *content* of these masters into the public domain doesn't solve those problems.

But on the other hand, as long as that content is *not* public domain, no one can even begin to undertake those problems.

If all those masters were in the public domain (and had not been burned), we would have no money to archive or preserve them. The best we could hope for is to seek major grants, or start a fund-raising campaign.

But as long as those masters belong to a private corporation, we can't even try to find grants or donors. There's nothing to do at all.

I dunno doc, after having a

artappraiser — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 07:50:25 +0000

In reply to Hoarding, Archiving, and the Public Domain: Universal Vault Edition

I dunno doc, after having a day to think on what was bothering me about your post: though I am happy to be corrected, I think you are venturing into red herring territory here and that actually is detrimental to a sound logical argument about public domain issues.

If something is one of a kind and irreplaceable and copying will not help, public domain has nothing to do with it. I'll will be perfectly forthright and say I don't know anything about master recordings and the technology of duplicating them, but nowhere do I see you argue that this could have and should have been done. You are just arguing that because the public did not have ownership, that somehow has to do with the originals being lost in the fire?

As to protecting archives of any kind and precious one of a kind objects: public institutions can have fires, too. And earthquakes, floods, theft, looting and wars or fallen governments with total defunding of public institutions. This is something I do know about, as an art historian and appraiser of fine art. It's a long time, passionate unsolved argument between archeologists and the art market: if something has high monetary value, does it not insure that it's taken care of for generations, whether public or privately owned.

Archives of little monetary value especially have a notorious lack of the necessary public funding. Monetary value makes people want to own things and take care of them, whether public or private ownership. As much as we academically inclined like dusty old stuff, most people could care less. If it doesn't have monetary value, it doesn't often get taken care of so well by either taxes or donations. Even though monetary value is also inducement to theft or looting.

It is often:take care of the living humans first. Especially in the case of war or chaos, archeologists argue looting should get high attention. And the answer often is: who gives a shit about that stuff right now? People are dying! How dare you care more about history than living people? This is actually where I am sympathetic to the private ownership argument against the archeologists who believe monetary value hurts. A lot of great one of a kind objects survived wars and fallen governments because private owners felt it had monetary value that could save their lives.

I've also been in more than a few historical societies and institution collections that have objects that I consider incredibly precious but have little monetary value, so they are crumbling into dust. Because no one will pay for the labor to conserve or restore which will cost more than the monetary value of the objects. I even own such things myself! I.E., it will cost more to deacidify that drawing than it's worth, and I don't have the money to burn, so I don't do it and it's not going to last much longer and it will be gone soon, just like me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Also there was this other

artappraiser — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 07:43:28 +0000

In reply to I dunno doc, after having a

Also there was this other article over at The Atlantic a couple weeks ago that caught my eye the other day and so was also in my mind

The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper

University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.

By Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration at Northeastern University, May 26

Now these are mostly not one-of-a-kind items. I was seeing tragic implications myself here, thinking as I do of them as wonderful one-of-a-kind collections, made me very sad. But I'm not rich so I am not going to endow them to be kept in perpetuity. And it seems the next generation will not care to keep them in good shape, precisely because many of them have been copied or they can buy digital versions for pennies! And they feel the money could be more wisely used for other things. On the other hand, I bet whichever books in those collections have considerable monetary value,those will be much more safely kept and already are being much more safely kept. And especially one-of-a-kind of monetary value, if they happen to have such things.