• Preserving digital files indefinitely is a solved problem. You put it in an automatically monitored redundant system that exists across multiple physical locations and replace drives as needed. This is just incompetence and institutional failure.

  • And they wonder why internet pirates so often act like they’re trying to preserve dying media. Its because they’ve created an environment where that’s true. If I want to watch a version of the original star wars trilogy without a bunch of wibbly wobbly CGI bullshit, do you know how hard that is?

    The vast majority of internet pirates aren’t unreasonable scoundrels fueled by hatred of media, they’re usually people who love media and analysis and see that the current system doesn’t actually benefit the people making the stories we love and doesn’t preserve those stories once produced

    • Gabe Newell’s quote from 13 years ago will never not be relevant in such discussions:

      In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.

      Spotify, Netflix (in it’s earlier days) have shown that time and time again. People love convenience. We are ultimately lazy animals. I think if you created a streaming service tailored to really old, obscure shit and you gave it a reasonable price, people would buy it.

  •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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    134 months ago

    How telling that even in an article raising the issue, they don’t mention the security that comes with the massive network of private collections on the internet.

    It literally seems like at every turn, capitalism just degrades the value of what humanity creates. It keeps art locked away in obscurity or unfinished because of the greed of copyright holders who aren’t even artists themselves. It provides a strong market incentive to sell off quality products so that they can have their value completely torpedoed for the sake of quarterly profits.

    Currency is supposed to grease the wheels of civilization, not bring all productivity to a halt in a spectacular mess of paper-chasing.

  • Use CD-RW: it records the information in the crystallization of metal.

    It’s the ONLY method I’ve encountered that seems damn-near eternal.


    I’ve no idea if the DVD-RW discs also are metal-layers.


    The record-1-time media deteriorate, though the AZO chemistry is supposed to last longer.

    Magnetic media all deteriorate.