There was a very interesting opinion piece by Victor Keegan in the Media Guardian today. It’s worth reading the whole thing of course, but I’ve excerpted it to give you an idea here.
It’s certainly no stretch to see just how this impacts recorded music as much as anything else…
Is copyright getting in the way of us preserving our history?
The issue of copyright is a global nightmare for anyone interested in digital preservation
Historians 100 years hence will have an abundance of source material about how ordinary lives were lived during the 21st century thanks to the unprecedented way we leave traces through websites, email, Twitter and social networks such as Facebook.
Well, that’s the theory. In practice, most of this living history will be discarded in digital dustbins unless something is done about it. We are often told that, thanks to startling improvements in technology, all our personal memories will soon be able to be stored on something the size of a sugar cube. But the granules that make up that sugar cube are widely scattered and difficult if not impossible to recover.
It is reckoned that the average life expectancy of a website is less than 75 days and that at least 10% of UK websites are lost or replaced with new material every six months. These figures come from a statement by the British Library at yesterday’s launch of the UK Web Archive, which will guarantee access in perpetuity to thousands of hand-picked UK websites – some of which might otherwise have faced oblivion.
They include Antony Gormley’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Project. This involved 2,400 participants, and the live stream by Sky Arts would no longer have existed online from next month had the BL not taken over responsibility for it. Other projects to be preserved for posterity include a record of the Credit Crunch and the 2010 general election.
The British Library has trouble sourcing even the most popular works from the major record labels, who still cite copyright reasons (though institutionalised entropy is probably more to blame) for not routinely making copies available for permanent archiving.
Worse still, the vast majority of the recorded music in the vaults of those labels, the provenance of which could well be unclear or problematic – and the condition of which is both unknown, but certainly deteriorating – is entirely off-limits to the archivists of culture and heritage.
The article ends:
It is sometimes argued that if copyright law is standing in the way of a universal archive then maybe the world’s collective memories should be placed into some kind of escrow account, not to be opened until copyrights have been sorted out or expired. This sounds plausible, but it would act against the worthy principles espoused by the British Library and others that as much as is humanly possible should not just be available but available now.
And if this is true for websites, it’s true also for books. And if it’s true for books, it’s true also for records.
And I would go one step further… and that’s to argue that the case for the digital public archiving of recorded music is of particular urgency – if only because the magnetic tape on which the vast majority of recorded masters reside are falling to pieces as we speak.
2 Responses to “Is copyright getting in the way of us preserving our history?”
Bouf. To attempt to preserve everything is to live in the past. It used to be that almost everything was valuable because there was so little of it. Now we have so much stuff and the capacity to store it that it is assumed that it is the right thing to do. The skill of managing a library is knowing what to discard and when.
Much of the material held in record companies vaults is rubbish. Much of the music product issued each year is rubbish. The historical importance of the footage of every minute of the fourth plinth project is debatable.
I used to work at the British Library, so I have an idea of the volume of stuff they do manage to preserve. The question for me is how much of it is ever viewed again? When did you last request something from the British Library?
Andrew, I’m certain Romney brings up some good points, but I thought it was a good post. I don’t like the thought of losing history or records that you can touch and feel. I think people want to touch music, feel music and experience music still today. Downloads and digital are only a part of the answer. I still have the first tape that I made in college of original music. It means something to me. It is a physical representation of something that I put a lot of work into. I know we’re discussing digital archiving, but I think it’d be great to preserve as much of both the digital age and the physical remnants of music as possible. Cheers, man….drew :-)