Haystack Situation Looking Worse And Worse: Why Did The State Dept. Endorse This Mess?
The Legality Of News Aggregators

Film Archives Being Eaten Away; Would Be Nice If People Could Make Copies To Preserve

Movie Industry

from the but-would-that-be-'theft'? dept

Tue, Sep 14th 2010 9:44pm — Mike Masnick
Sneeje points us to a recent BBC article about how many old films are being literally eaten up by fungus, such that important elements of our history are being deleted via the "archival" process. Of course, if this content was digitized and allowed to be shared, this wouldn't be a problem, as there would be more and more copies available, rather than relying on a single point of failure made up of film with a gel coating that happens to be "ideal food for fungi like Aspergillus and Penicillium."

Filed Under: film, fungi

62 Comments | Leave a Comment

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. icon
    xs (profile), 15 Sep 2010 @ 12:18pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Preservation is costly

    You are still missing the point. Had there been no copyright restrictions, it wouldn't be up to the studios and copyright owners to keep copies and decide which one to keep. And if they are freely available for anyone to copy, copying effort will likely happen more or less continuously as people acquires copies of films, shows they are interested in. So we don't need to preserve any particular copies, because we will have newer copies in better conditions available.

    This is how old classics from ancient time are preserved, by people copying the original, instead of locking it up in an archive. Those that were locked up for one reason or another had all been lost.

Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here



Subscribe to the Techdirt Daily newsletter




Comment Options:

  • Use markdown for basic formatting. (HTML is not supported.)
  • Remember name/email/url (set a cookie)

Haystack Situation Looking Worse And Worse: Why Did The State Dept. Endorse This Mess?
The Legality Of News Aggregators
Follow Techdirt
Insider Shop - Show Your Support!

Advertisement
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Chat
Advertisement
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Recent Stories

Friday

19:39 Wrestler Booker T Sues Activision For Copyright Infringement Over Fairly Generic Character Depiction (3)
15:30 Appeals Court Takes No Time At All In Rejecting Patent Troll's Ridiculous Lawsuit Against Cloudflare (4)
13:42 Can Russia Actually 'Unplug' From The Internet? (9)
12:10 Good Luck, Japan: Government About To Make All Copyright Infringement A Criminal Offense (39)
10:44 Calling Out Copyright Troll Mathew Higbee (25)
10:39 Daily Deal: CuriosityStream 2 Year Subscription (0)
09:20 Georgia Gov't Employee Somehow Manages To Get Criminally Charged For Violating Public Records Laws (5)
06:15 5G Has Become The Magic Pixie Dust Of Tech Policy Conversations (18)
03:16 Sony Using Copyright To Take Down Its Own Anti-Piracy Propaganda (25)

Thursday

20:02 Sony: We Are Totally Open For Crossplay, Game Developers: No, You Totally Are Not (16)
More arrow
Advertisement
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads

Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.