Copyrights and CD-Rs Endanger Audio History 202
SEWilco writes "A study by the Library of Congress has found that many audio recordings are being lost due to copyright restrictions and temporary media. Old audio recordings are protected by a various US state copyrights, so it's hard for preservationists to get and copy material. Recent data is threatened by being put on writable CDs, because CD-Rs begin to lose data after a few years, so recordings from as recently as 9/11 and the 2008 elections are already at risk."
Depends on the Discs (Score:5, Informative)
CDs are rarely an all-or-nothing affair. Even if you do lose data, you tend to not lose it all in one freak accident, not to mention solid state and magnetic media make fantastic paperweights after a solar storm.
Re:Vanishing People (Score:4, Informative)
And Kylie Minogue looks fabulous for a 40 year old....
Re:Vanishing People (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Depends on the Discs (Score:5, Informative)
I also recently (yesterday actually!) opened an old DVD+R (with an HFS volume) from 2002 and rearchived it to a new DVD. It still read perfectly, but it's been stored in a cool dark place, and has been mounted maybe 10 times.
300 years... (Score:3, Informative)
Memorex claims 300 year life for their fancy (expensive) archival CD-R and 100 years for DVD-R.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/sections/reviews/specific.aspx?articleid=17324 [cdrinfo.com]
Take that with a grain of salt, of course.
Use a camcorder (Score:4, Informative)
So where is the (completely legal under US law) software that the Library of Congress can use to back up Blu-Rays that have been released recently?
It's called the analog hole [wikipedia.org], and the MPAA has endorsed it [arstechnica.com].
Re:Depends on the Discs (Score:4, Informative)
Cool and dark are the really important parts. On write-once optical media, UV will fade the dye making it harder to distinguish pit/land transitions, while high temperature will melt the unmelted dye, making the pits/lands closer together (thus also making the transitions more difficult to discern).
Using RW media will alleviate some of this problem, as this uses a phase-change mechanism instead which is more "digital" than the dye used in write-once.
Actually, no (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct about federal law. State copyright law is a very different kettle of snapping turtles with regards to audio copyrights. Due to weirdness in the way federal copyright law is constructed, audio recordings made before 1972 are not covered, and so federal copyright law does not preempt state law, and so audio works made prior to then are covered by state common law copyright. In most states, this affords protection until 2049. Some states passed anti-copying and other laws, making it a huge minefield to figure out what the exact legal status is.
There's an excellent paper [clir.org] explaining this available, if you want the details.
Re:TheLibrarianBay.org (Score:2, Informative)
"librarian" is in this case, an euphemism, I think.
If you can't figure out what for, what are you doing on slashdot?
Re:Not quite right (Score:3, Informative)
The software itself may be legal in such cases, but it remains illegal to discuss how to create such software, or to distribute such software to others, which means it's still illegal unless you can break the encryption and write the software all by yourself. How many people do you think are capable of that?