This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for the life of the author plus 70 years. We know there are gobs of cultural artifacts from as recently as the 80s (videos, games, etc.) that are permanently lost.
Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.
Idk the exact mechanisms that should be used, but have long said that copyright protection of all forms should be dependent on the rights holder depositing and funding the archival (to a minimum length of the expiration of the work's copyright + x years), such that public has access to the work upon expiration.
Include a mechanism that allows encryption keys to be held in escrow, to be released publicly for all drm schemes the work is released on.
The LoC may or may not be the best avenue for such a scheme, but it should be funded by the rights holder as a condition of the protected term (or maybe for an extension beyond a base term of ~12years ala patents).
Depositing a copy of a book to the LoC is already the (dated) default behavior for hard-copy published text. Even if it's not strictly required, it mostly works.
But as I said, perhaps you get a base 12 years protection just by publishing (the status quo, but shorter base term), and only register the source/ archive if protection beyond that is financially worthwhile.
DRM content that wants DMCA type protection (hopefully a more reasonably thought out protection) requires a single tested key in escrow per protected work, or doesn't get any circumvention or takedown protection.
The exact mechanisms and terms would need to be tweaked by format and maybe even market, but the idea is to create underlying aligned incentives, without unduly burdening casual creators who might not wish to opt-in.
> This is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for the life of the author plus 70 years. We know there are gobs of cultural artifacts from as recently as the 80s (videos, games, etc.) that are permanently lost.
> Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.
Firstly, copyright doesn't have anything do with the problem outlined in the OP, that 75% of "golden age" silent movies have been lost. The reason it identifies is that these films were "few, fragile, flammable" and that "almost no one thought they were worth saving." Copies weren't going to magically appear: if they were fragile, expensive to produce, and viewed as ephemeral nothing short of some kind of expensive government mandate would have led to much higher preservation rates. Such a mandate would not happen unless there was a contemporary interest in preservation, which there wasn't.
Secondly, running an archive isn't free. Short copyright terms might actually lead to less preservation, since that would make the creator be even less motivated to preserve the work for the long term. I'm not sure what you mean by "independent archivalists," but if it's data hoarders (individuals or collectively) that's not really going to cut it. The data on someone's hard drive array is very unlikely live past its owner, it will be almost certainly junked by the heirs to the estate. Preservation really requires an institution.
> Secondly, running an archive isn't free. Short copyright terms might actually lead to less preservation, since that would make the creator be even less motivated to preserve the work for the long term.
Yet archives have very high public value. We've recognized that since the formation of the library of congress.
The issue I think we have is we already have a system mandated to archive copyrighted material, yet it's not been advanced to accommodate the digital era and there's no mandate that IP holders aid it in retention.
I think increasing public spending so the likes of archive.org can continue to function would be a net good for society.
>> Firstly, copyright doesn't have anything do with the problem outlined in the OP
> Sure but it will probably lead to the same thing happening again.
No. The "same thing" is was people didn't preserve things that other people now wish were saved... but only just barely. No one here actually aching to see the lost silent flim "The Devil Dancer" or would watch it if they could, they're just reacting to a statistic. Here's another statistic 99.9999...% of everything ever said has been lost. None of that has anything to do with copyright, and eliminating copyright would hardly change a thing.
I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise. Things were lost in the past because no copies survived. Now we have machines which can copy a million books a second and hard drives which can store thousands of movies, but we’ve created a powerful legal regime which discourages the proliferation of archives of this material.
Google tried to archive every book in existence, and was stopped by copyright. In our lifetimes copyright has prevented preservation. The whole effort of google books was shut down half way through. Who knows what they would have preserved if they continued.
Your suggestion that no one here really wants to see these films is irrelevant. Someone studying film might want to learn how film techniques progressed. Someone studying technology might want to learn how certain effects were achieved. Someone studying sociology might want to learn how social messages have evolved (or stayed the same) over the years. Lots of information will have been lost with these films.
Punishing and discouraging copying will certainly help ensure that fewer copies survive. Discs will rot, licenses will change hands, and the few copies that survive will dwindle and vanish.
To say the truth, files to be shared often need to be produced first: books scanned and OCRed, DVDs grabbed and repackaged, games actually cracked, etc. There is a scene beyond just people running Bittorrent nodes.
> the act of illegally copying computer programs, recordings, films, etc. to sell them at much cheaper prices
What's interesting is that this definition includes selling.
So by this definition at least, regular file sharing of copyrighted media, even illegal or infringing distribution, would not qualify as piracy, since no sale is involved.
If you pay attention, the sites that get taken down are often laden with ads, so rather lose the ability to claim some sort of non-commercial exemption.
Even if it's fruitless in the end, we're still gonna shame the use of the word "piracy" on sight. It's quite simply offensive to compare the copying of bits to high seas piracy which includes murder and rape. Of course the copyright monopolists had to spin up such propaganda: copyright infringement just has no weight to it.
> Even if it's fruitless in the end, we're still gonna shame the use of the word "piracy" on sight.
Who's this "we"?
> It's quite simply offensive to compare the copying of bits to high seas piracy which includes murder and rape.
You are talking that way, way too seriously and interpreting it in weird way in order to take maximum offense.
And my point is it isn't a comparison: "pirate" has an established meaning that is literally just your "file sharing enthusiasts." Also, actual high-seas piracy has diminished to the point where "pirates" is mainly understood as file-sharing pirates or as goofy cartoon characters (e.g. "talk like a pirate day" and "Pirates of the Caribbean"). You have do to a lot of deliberate work to strain to take offense at the association.
> Of course the copyright monopolists had to spin up such propaganda: copyright infringement just has no weight to it.
It should be noted your alternative "file sharing enthusiasts" is at least as propagandistic, just from the opposite party.
Not that I think copyright piracy is that big if a deal, it's just that computer geeks' overwrought stridency on the issue is obnoxious and obscures more than it informs.
People such as myself and the person you replied to.
> You are talking that way, way too seriously
I am. It is a serious matter.
> interpreting it in weird way in order to take maximum offense
Yes, I take maximum offense when some monopolist tries to compare me to rapers and pillagers because I copied bits.
> You have do to a lot of deliberate work to strain to take offense at the association.
Not at all. Actual piracy is still happening even today in the 21st century. Everyone knows exactly what a pirate is and it's exactly what comes to mind when someone mentions them. It's not some forgotten history only geeks know about. People will even mentally picture those very same "file sharing enthusiasts" you mention as roguish types when in fact perfectly normal people forwarding pictures, videos and documents on WhatsApp are a perfect fit for the definition. People literally infringe copyright every day at massive scales without even realizing it. They infringe copyright when they save a picture from a web site.
> It should be noted your alternative "file sharing enthusiasts" is at least as propagandistic, just from the opposite party.
Except I didn't use those terms. I used the proper one: copyright infringement. Sounds like a whole lot of nothing when put that way, doesn't it?
> it's just that computer geeks' overwrought stridency on the issue is obnoxious and obscures more than it informs.
So the copyright industry insists on using propaganda words like "piracy" purely to add weight to copyright infringement and make it seem more real than it really is but I'm the one obscuring the issue? Right.
Also, I can understand the downvotes, but why the flagging? You can call them thieves, but not parasites? I feel that HN has become quite censorship-heavy lately.
To elaborate on that, people often claim it's not theft because the owner keeps the goods. That's why it's more appropriate to consider it parasitism (you are eating at someone else's table without paying).
this is obviously bull though.. how do you even make a study like that? you'd need to associate each illegal downloader to his/her real identity and then to each of their legal purchases... that's ridiculous, and even if academics had the means to do it, it would be illegal. piracy itself is illegal in most countries, so if you don't report them you are literally an accomplice.
There was some study I saw, maybe even released by Spotify, that showed that a massive percentage (maybe a majority?) of streamed music was several decades old.
So they're raking in cash from rent seeking really. It would be healthier for music if what you said was true though.
Some people are more musically adventurous than others or they sometimes latch onto a new genre or artist. But the reality is that most of us largely default to what we listened to in school or maybe the decade after. I know I listen to relatively little music created in the past 20 years and don't really care if a streaming service is missing XYZ newish artist.
I actually have quite a large, somewhat curated digital music library and, with a few hundred dollars and a few days of effort, I could probably patch any particular holes I have among songs/albums I especially enjoy, but mostly I use streaming including a lot of curated playlists.
Not looking to out any underground trackers, but am curious as someone who wasn't ever on what.cd and hasn't ever replaced long "hiatus" then gone waffles.
Microsoft (zune) and then Google (music) have me not even trusting the convenience of paid subscriptions anymore.
Even if you keep some music, you lose useful history, playlists, etc. on a whim.
Even with the new YouTube music, songs I own, and added to a playlist last week are suddenly grayed out without explanation or ability to see details. Only right click option is to remove.
Yeah I guess Spotify is okay if you don't mind half of the back catalogue of your favorite artists either never being present on the platform, or just magically disappearing at some arbitrary time. It's hilarious, I canceled my Spotify service a year ago or something, and I hopped back on recently to check a playlist as I couldn't remember a song. So many tracks in my playlists are no longer available on the service. Had me feeling pretty good about my colossal archive of purchased mp3s/FLACs from Bandcamp.
Yep. Spotify had at one point completely eliminated my desire to torrent entire discographies, but my listening is starting to shift to Bandcamp and youtube-dl'd MP3s/M4As with Spotify getting increasingly worse both on the library front and on a technical level with its app.
It's hard not to recall Gabe Newell's "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". Steam and Spotify offer a really good service, and a lot of people find it not worth it to pirate stuff.
'specially as a linux user. Dealing with Wine/Proton on my own vs just buying it on steam and have it justwork^tm is worth it almost everytime, especially when using cheap steamkey stores.
If the corporation who owns the original IP, abandoned it for 10+ years with no way of legitimately buying it from them, then it means they don't want our money and they don't care about it, so it's fair game.
Sadly because the industry actively fights against it, and people can be punished for it.
Also "sadly" because it's not exactly a dependable process -- we're depending on people to spontaneously choose to preserve / share media widely enough there will be decent copies when/if they go out of "legitimate" circulation.
It'd be better if archiving & preserving copies were a mandatory step to being awarded copyright protection. (Which would not displace filesharing, of course...)
Another sad thing is the mentality of IP rightsholders. For abandoned songs/movies/works that don't make any money anymore, they'd rather expend the cost/effort to destroy them than allow them to be distributed for free, even though destroying them is likely more expensive. Totally malicious. Reminds me of grocery stores that throw out food at the end of the day and spend effort guarding the dumpsters so nobody gets food for free.
Pirates are just independent corsairs. The latter are pirates who work for the king, they are doing the same kind of robbery, but since the king profits off it, they are called "legal". That's what modern copyright holders are: pirates backed by the king.
This is wrong. Privateers, which is the more general class corsairs belonged to, were akin to modern PMCs and operated under similar constraints. They mostly obeyed the rules of war, were punished when they did not, and their conduct was similar to national ships in nearly every regard. They took prisoners of war and were taken prisoner in turn.
When one group is taking ships and killing every living thing on it then illegally selling the cargo and personal effects of the occupants, and another group is taking ships and dropping the occupants off at a POW camp then sending it to the admiralty to be legally sold, the latter is not doing the same kind of robbery. Arguably they aren't doing any kind of robbery at all.
I don't think pirates regularly executed the entire crew of a ship either. There's no monetary benefit in doing so, it will encourage reprisals, and future ships will refuse to surrender.
Once we drop the legality fig leaf, because that's a matter of who writes the law, we'll see an organized gang of pirates that follow some rules, wear an emblem, and have bosses on the land who sell things captured in the sea.
I download YouTube videos I like. A number of them aren't available anymore. As far as I am aware, I have the last backups. I've also downloaded obscure .swf files and weird soundtracks and sound effects from obscure and now deprecated flash games I used to play in my youth.
If you feel like chatting with others who also archive YouTube (and other) content, consider stopping by my discord server:
https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC
We maintain a central list [1] of content that various members have archived, so that when content is removed from YouTube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and sometimes direct efforts to preserve specific content.
Yeah I've started doing the same. When I [rarely] log into my YT account to find an old favorite from a couple years ago or whatever, I notice that something like 2/3 of my Favorites are unavailable now (I've been using YT since it launched so that kinda skews the chances in that direction of course, but the point remains).
I don't think copyright has much to do with it, but rather the lack of (cheap) recording/duplicating equipment people had access to before the 80's. As soon as VCRs were on the scene, your average American quickly got to recording broadcast content to VHS tapes for either sharing it with friends or personal archival.
The point of the parent comment is that, if the copyright people had their way, VCRs and the like would be irrelevant, because they would make it so that you _couldn't_ back up media. It's a pattern that keeps repeating itself. Copyright owners with deep enough pockets try to build "anti-piracy" technical measures which actually just prevent people from backing up their media, while piracy continues unabated regardless of those technical hurdles that impact 99% of people.
> The point of the parent comment is that, if the copyright people had their way, VCRs and the like would be irrelevant, because they would make it so that you _couldn't_ back up media.
The (grand)parent comment didn't talk about any of that.
It was hard to back up media. Those vcrs had macro vision that made coping bought movies hard (we tried). Without the internet it was hard to tell why it was failing.
Intellectual property is not really a property, it's a limited time monopoly preference. If you have a chair as your property, it doesn't magically become public property in N years, it's yours forever. Because it's a real property, unlike IP.
More than that, IP is anti-property in nature, because it restricts you from using your real property, you can't use your printing press to print a book that you like.
I know that there's an argument to be made about authors wanting to eat, but that's a separate issue, it doesn't change the fact that IP is logically inconsistent and the "property" part is misleading.
> If you have a chair as your property, it doesn't magically become public property in N years, it's yours forever.
Copyright lasts 70 years past the death of the author. I assure you, you will not own that chair after you die.
Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct. No will, and the decision is made by the probate court. No heirs? Then your chair does go to the state. Or maybe it gets left on the street to be taken by any member of the public who sees it and happens to want it.
Intellectual property in the end is really not that different from any other kind of property. Like any form of property, it's a social construct that exists because people think and act like it exists, and because the resources of the state are used to ensure that any dissenters are suppressed and/or punished.
Ultimately, the reason that your chair sits in your living room, rather than in your better-armed or more muscular neighbor's fireplace, is the same reason that you can't sell bootleg copies of the latest Disney movie on Amazon: the voluntary observation and enforcement of the law by human beings.
> Your heirs may own the chair, but inheritance itself is also a legal construct.
If inheritance didn't exist, I imagine people would achieve a similar result by gifting everything to their heirs towards the end of their life. And there would be cases where someone meant to do so but died earlier than expected, or where someone did so when they thought they were dying but then ended up living 10 years longer. Compared to that world, inheritance with wills is more convenient and orderly for everyone involved, but it is not the thing that enables people to pass things on to heirs.
> inheritance with wills is more convenient and orderly for everyone involved, but it is not the thing that enables people to pass things on to heirs
The state's monopoly on violence, and the rule of law it allows, is definitely the thing that enables people to pass things on to their designated heirs. Otherwise, every dispute between heirs, every contested will, every contested end-of-life "gift" would carry the potential for bloodshed.
The specific laws that we have right now could be written differently, and things like inheritance could work differently, but you cannot escape the fact that they are all just creatures of the human mind.
That is, until those concepts begin to be encoded in and enforced by machines.
Gosh how many folks here believe any sort of property is "real"? I guess I see intellectual property as made up rules, just like exclusion rights on real property are made up rules. We're just riffing off mammalian instinct. We have complete freedom to make up different rules.
"property" is the simplest form of governance, whereas a resource is assigned to a person which takes all the decisions regarding the subject including transferring the property to another person. it's really a very old governance model well understood in most societies.
now IP is a confusing form of governance because all the contradictions mentioned by gran parent comment while being named "property" and because it's being applied to something that is not a resource which means it does not even need governance in first place
I've come to view physical property as the odd one out.
IP makes sense to me - you are assigning ownership of purely human created constructs, and someone assigning me Mickey Mouse doesn't use up a resource and prevent you from making your own IP.
But physical property... you're telling me that someone ('someone' being a government - who probably took it by force from some other group of people) can just "assign" me something no human had a hand in creating, I can morph it, then sell it to some other person for a buck? The whole chain of custody is tainted. I should not be able to "own" these things no human created, at best, I should be able to rent it from
Try making that argument to a peasant prior to Enclosure.
How is "I own this text" less arbitrary than "I own this forest"? You can't "own" a forest, you can only prevent other people from entering it but if the forest is large enough you can't even do so on your own, even if you live in the forest.
Heck, while you might "own" a chair, how do you "own" a million chairs? You can't use a million chairs. You can't even store a million chairs in one place. You certainly can't guard them yourself, much like the forest.
And how do you "own" a business? How do you "own" the factory when you're not even using it, nor would be able to do so yourself and instead you have to pay dozens of people to use it for you?
"Property" literally just means "exclusive claim backed up by force". That's the primary function of the state, it's why we have police.
> I know that there's an argument to be made about authors wanting to eat
My view is that we should build a system that ensures every person gets to eat (and have shelter, medical care, other necessities) without the need to pay for it, simply because this is the right thing to do.
Then under such a system, we can eliminate intellectual property restrictions, because they will no longer be necessary to ensure that artists eat. IP restrictions actually slow down innovation, so eliminating them will have huge benefits to society.
By the way you can ensure that everyone gets fed etc without paying for it by building an economy where everyone is part owner of the productive machinery they depend upon. Then no one is poor. Creating an economy where a preponderance of the firms are cooperatives is a good start. So this can be done in a traditionally libertarian way, without high taxes or strong government intervention.
Stephan Kinsella's talk "Intellectual Nonsense: Fallacious Arguments for IP", is a must watch. There's no reason to have IP law and in fact there is actually good reason to believe they stand on shaky legal ground.
One of the arguments he brings up is that the Constitution specifically says "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". It can be argued that IP law does not do this. In fact it does the opposite. As soon as you have a patent or copyright on something you are incentivized to not promote the progress of science and arts, at least not until your monopoly terms expire (which is never, with the copyright extensions).
It seems like there needs to be some understanding of “benefitting from one’s own work” as part of this conversation.
If I make a thing, and am actively providing it for consumption, I have an interest in maintaining its integrity.
Contrarily, if I have made something, but it’s just sitting idling away as something I simply own as an IP, it will be allowed to languish, in every sense of the word.
There are similar concepts with trademarks; if you don’t actively defend trademark usages, you stand the risk of losing it to the public domain.
Likewise, if you don’t actually provide your creation to the public in a consumable way, you should lose the ability to claim it.
Per the article, first ever attempts at preservation were intended for copyright protection. I’m not following the logic of why IP owners would want media to become lost.
Of course in this case it's still possible the studio retains original copies in its archives but according to the article, the write-off means the show can not be re-released so those copies literally have no value to the IP owners and might be destroyed, too.
It would seem it's actively in their interests to have the most of their customers forget.
First, these companies do serve very derivative content, that wouldn't be remotely interesting when compared to their inspirations.
The comparison in many case is so unfair that it shed lights on the incompetence of the team.
For some example, there was the 'definitive edition' of the PS2 era GTA games, if you go on Steam you can't find the originals. You can buy the definitive edition that stands at a mighty 0.6 user score on Metacritic though.
For movies I'm not sure what would illustrate best but when the Ghostbusters reboot movie came out, it seems they made an effort not to acknowledge the originals. And when the big toys line-up came up after the reboot's disaster of a reception, they did as if it didn't exist and went all for the nostalgia.
Copyright laws govern distribution, and permit noncommercial uses such as archiving copies. Technologically it has never been easier to capture and store media, and many people and organizations do.
Things from the 80s are permanently lost simply because no one bothered to preserve copies of them.
I live in a small country with a weird language, that was one a part of a larger country with a few other weird languages and a lot of good music.
A bunch of that music is lost forever now... some newer artists still play the old songs, but there are no recorded originals. For some songs you can only find shitty quality recordings on youtube when someone recorded an audio tape to a youtube video at shitty quality and split into 10minute chunks. Original recording studios don't exist anymore, CDs maybe existed, maybe not, tapes surely did, but those degraded a lot, modern streaming has made piracy hard, since there are not a lot of listeners who would rip that, and youtube only has that song in a video format, with a video intro, and a silent part in between to make the video make sense (unlike a radio edit). And even if people somehow downloaded and stored that music, how am I supposed to get it too? Torrenting is hard for many people, services like kazaa don't exist anymore, existing torrent sites close down, zero seeders on what's left over and even less ways to actually find it online.
Yeah, sure, all that music could fit on a single modern hard drive, but nobody put it there and made it available for others, and in turn, it is lost, either fully (noone has the HQ original anymore) or partially (some people have it, for now, but others are unable to obtain it).
I'd much prefer some national archive taking those recordings (music, videos, books, etc.), digitizing them (or preferably starting with a digital version) and then offer it for download after some reasonable amount of time (which would be way shorter than death+70 years). A good indicator for 'when' would be the availability of the media... Am I unable to buy it in a reasonable way for a reasonable price? Ok, it's protected. Noone is selling it anymore, or not selling it in my country (even digitally)... the author/publshed obviously doesn't want my money, so why complain if it's on offer for free.
TLDR: think of your favourite non-mainstream band from 20 years ago and try to download their songs.. good luck with that.
What Alan lomax did or what fat possum record are doing is extremely hard work and it’s sad that there aren’t many more people like those. If somone would start a kickstarter to preserve old traditional music I would be the first to support them.
Btw if you don’t know them there is a amazing documentary from fat possum about their work on YouTube.
>
Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.
Which is great for creating cultural scarcity, because it means that people will:
1. Keep buying new things.
2. Pay through the nose for rare old cultural artifacts.
The article is not about that. There would be no archivalists because no one saw film as art or something worth saving. Copyright was not the issue at hand.
Meanwhile copyright protection is required to encourage creative people to make things
Surely that much data has value somewhere, and a marketplace can be formed where decaying film on one side is auctioned to AI training data stores on the other. Older material is more valuable since it starts human measurement earlier, and so can predict longer-term shifts.
(Imagination in service to neoliberal capitalism - it's a real world _Hyperion_ novel, forums like this mind-jack you with arcane symbols into miniscule wiggles in the GHz range, roughly 1500*8 bytes of them at a time, pushed through a radio, into the kernel, into a program, and spat out into an array of glowing quantum effects... But still, even here, Buster Keaton is funny.)
If that were true there would have been no need for the AHRA. Copying audio tapes at home was a copyright violation. Doing the same for VHS was and still is.
No. That was still based on DIGITAL recording, and the lie that "perfect digital copies" would cause an explosion of piracy. And of course our "representatives" toadied up to the corporations and abetted them in screwing consumers. And, by levying an asinine "tax" on blank media, it actually AUTHORIZED home copying by presuming guilt.
Anybody, yes ANYBODY based in reality knew that essentially all "piracy" took place in dorm rooms and bedrooms on double-cassette boom boxes... FAR from "perfect" copies. People who could afford DAT recorders were not going to be sapping record-company profits.
And we all know what happened next: The "perfect digital copies" lie was further debunked with the ascendancy of MP3... another lossy and imperfect reproduction.
Which Golden Age? Yes, the preservation for pre-1927 films is very very poor, 3/4's was lost, with most of that loss being things make before 1925.
Much more of the post-1927 content was preserved (more of it was preserved with sound once we switched to sound on film) - I'd note however that Silent Movies are virtually unrecognizable by modern viewers as being even the same art form as sound pictures - and sound movies didnt reach the same... production values? as the silents until 1936-37.
The period between 1927-and 1937 was a period of reinvention and learning of a new medium, which is why - my general take is the golden age of Hollywood was 1939 to 1959.
Consider what films came out in 1939 -
* Gone with the Wind
* Wizard of Oz
* Mr. Smith goes to Washington
These are films that still find audiences today, now - 80 years or so on.
Most Americans might have seen one movie produced between 1927 and 1938 - but most people who are above 30 have seen at least two those three movies at least once.
And that trend continues from there on - where 1940 to 1959, most americans have seen one movie released in each of those years.
So while I dont disagree that we are losing heritage in these things - I take issue with their definition of Golden Age and the idea that there is value in saving everything ever written or filmed.
Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades, it was meant to be ephemeral topical entertainment, and functionally intended to be disposable. Most of the production of Poverty Row, and B pictures by the majors are like this, they were intended for Block Booking, and largely just as a way to fill the content needs of the theaters and as a way to provide steady revenue in the event an A picture flopped.
1939? I suppose you have to pick a year and call that the cutoff.
But you're cutoff leaves to the "Dark Ages" the films Frankenstein (1931), Love Me Tonight (1931), 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), King Kong (1933), It Happened One Night (1934), The Thin Man (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to name a few.
When I was mentioning most people have only see one pre-1939 film, I was specifically thinking of Snow White.
While I do not deny that movies of that era are often highly influential on later films, they do not lend themselves to modern watchability, because of the technical limitations of the medium at the time. Snow White being a notable exception because it was the literal first of its kind, and Disney has successfully restored and rereleased it decade after decade.
Largely I'm a believer that the merits of the film itself will lead to its preservation and often restoration and that preservation just for the sake of preservation isn't all that valuable a use of a limited resource.
I suppose I disagree since all the ones I listed I feel are entirely watchable for a modern audience. This modern audience of me (and the wife too) loved them.
Also The Invisible Man (1933) and Easy Living (1937), but I agree with the parent that 1939 seems to be about when modern-ish script quality and production values became the norm.
I have a relatively controversial (at least to some) view that Citizen Kane was the first modern movie. When you watch it, it feels starkly modern compared to other production of its era.
> As with Pompeii graffiti and warehouse cuneiform tally tablets, from the anthropological perspective, the ephemeral is interesting.
It's only interesting after a looong period were it was very much uninteresting, causing so much to be destroyed until what remained became interesting as a rarity.
I think it's very likely that process of destruction is necessary to make past ephemera valuable.
The costs to try to save all of it are vast - the costs to try to save some of it are pretty reasonable. What's interesting is what has survived from the 20's was mostly by accident.
Yes, unfortunately, the title is clickbait. Generally "Golden Age of Hollywood" is a nebulous term, but only tends to encompass the last few years of silent films (if that).
In general, as I understand it, silent films were lost primarily for two reasons:
A) The film medium of the time was nitrocellulose, which unfortunately is highly flammable (several films were lost to vault fires) as well as being susceptible to decomposition.
B) With "talkies" becoming the dominant form after the late 1920s, the silver content in some of the old silent films was seen as being more valuable than the actual content. In other cases I think films were just dumped, being seen as not having any value and worth the storage costs anymore.
Television underwent a similar phenomenon from the beginning until the 1970s-1980s, due to videotape being expensive and reusable, and older material being seen as not economically valuable (especially after the transition from black and white to color). Doctor Who is probably the most famous example of a serial with missing episodes, but my understanding is that more rigorous archiving was not the norm for entertainment seen as more "disposable" (eg game shows, news programs) well after television companies archived their prime time programs.
Yeah, misleading headline. The article says "During the golden age of the silent movie (1912-29)", which is distinct from "the golden age of Hollywood" which typically describes the studio era, up through 1959, as you say.
Whatever period you define as the golden age of Hollywood, most of the movies are probably lost to time. That phrase — golden age — is a canard if it distracts from the actual point, which is that we've lost access to important artifacts of our culture and history, and we can't ever get it back.
Also, the fact that people have not seen a lot of movies from before 1939 does not argue that they should not be preserved. Most people haven't read The Iliad or Action Comics #1 either. Or visited the Acropolis, or watched the moon landing. We don't preserve artifacts because most people will want to use them in the future. In fact, we can't know what the future will need or want to know about our time, which is why we preserve as much as possible.
And yet Poverty Row produced Detour, one of the best noirs ever made. The intentions aren’t the only thing that matter here; the art does.
Further, it’s not purely about entertainment value. I recently watched Les Vampires, a 1916 serial from France. It’s true that the theatrical conventions aren’t the ones we know today, but it was fascinating watching Louis Feuillade figure out how to make a thriller on the fly, and some of the ideas he came up with created our current theatrical conventions. That historical understanding is important.
Thats the most part - and to be honest, in my opinion, most of the best Film Noir was probably produced by Poverty Row - even Poverty Row's output post 1939 became much more relevant for modern audiences - like on average even a Poverty Row picture in the post war era had better production values (on whole) than an A picture from a major in 1933 - simply because the state of the art had moved so dramatically forward.
Incidentally one of my favorite Noir's is He Walked by Night featuring a very very young Jack Webb. I'll check out Detour though.
> Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades
That doesn't matter though. I find silent movies interesting simply because of their age. It's a window into how people lived back then. Compare what's in the homes of the "average person" in a silent film to what you see in one of today's movies.
Is it? Often the people featured in films were.. basically only the wealthy classes. We have ample example of how they lived.
Also, often movies today do not depict an average person, they depict an idealized version of that. We have stills of the real thing, lots of them.
Bear in mind I'm not arguing against preservation - but its a limited resource, I'd prioritize early home movies and industrial films (what little there was) over the traditional A or B picture studio output.
Well I'm not claiming that they were documentaries. But the way they showed people, wealthy or average, indicates a very different standard of living. I can't think of any specific movies: just what's on TCM that catches my attention usually.
One of the most celebrated silent film characters was, "The Little Tramp", featuring their misadventures in trying to stay alive and not starve, being an immigrant, taking on terrible and often dangerous jobs, etc.
Chaplin was a brilliant filmmaker, his stuff remains watchable to this day - but no one could seriously look at his output and call it anything resembling reality - even at the time.
You're right - movies do not function as a reflection of reality. The Gold Rush is no more a documentary than Nosferatu.
But you can say the same about Michelangelo's David. An artist's output - and preserving it, is about preserving the culture, not a snapshot in time. "What did the produce, and why?" are compelling questions to ask.
There's not much from the 90s at all really. While some stuff is there, most of the stuff I remember from the 90s isn't on archive.org and probably nowhere else, except maybe in someones old hard drives or floppy disks at the bottom of a drawer.
The main geocities-alike web host I used around IIRC 1998-2001 is just gone, as far as I can tell. I think it was called spree.com. The spaces were intended to be used by some kind of sales affiliates, I think, but were de facto just little ad-free (unlike other hosts) web spaces with a decent amount of storage (a few MB, I think?). I wasn't the only one just using it as free web hosting.
I've tried a couple times, and can find no record of the service ever having existed, let alone any of the content that was on it (mine, or any other).
And Usenet is pretty fragmentary as well and, even among what was preserved, I don't know how accessible what archives there are as they went via Dejanews and then Google Groups.
Of course, there's also a huge amount of information about companies, products, news, etc. that was largely never in electronic form and--where it didn't just get tossed in the trash in the wake of some corporate buyout--is in the stacks of some library someplace.
> I don't know how accessible what archives there are as they went via Dejanews and then Google Groups.
And unfortunately Google has starting blocking some groups because of too much spam (that to some extent probably was enabled by Google itself in the first place), and unfortunately that means that the archives of those groups (pre-dating the current spam deluge) are inaccessible, too.
This isn't that much different from the rate at which stuff comes up in my modest set of Youtube subscriptions. And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant? And yet! 100 years from now they'll lament that so much of today's pop culture has simply been lost to random deletion or bit rot.
Already the link rot on youtube is significant. Very often I will find links like "listen to this music it's good", you go to youtube and not even the metadata is left, it's just an error page so you have no idea what it even was.
I know YouTube will throw a video to an extremely slow archival hard disk where getting 720p requires waiting a few minutes for YT to (presumably) move it to some regular storage tier with reasonable write speeds. But I've never heard of there being rot on the actual data YT stores, and I imagine it's on the same policy as Drive files where they're globally redundant, or at least in two different DCs.
It actually seems better from when I last looked at it, but you can you still hear skipping and audio jitter around spots like at 0:18. I've seen similar behavior on Twitter video uploads over the last few years.
I've seen video corruption myself on this video: https://youtu.be/XmWgskZFkh4. It's fixed now but there were glitches in the video and audio for a couple of years but somehow got fixed.
> And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant?
In some cases you won't know until decades later, when one of those videos becomes "lost media" and people start looking for it.
That's why, as long as people are willing to buy hard drives to store everything, we should let them save as much as they want for the future. Because you never know.
The first job of my professional career was at the Library of Congress in the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound Division working to digitize things like this.
First, it was a fascinating job because of how media has been stored over time. Most people think of records or even phonographs but there are wax cylinders, wire spool recordings, and a ton more. Unfortunately, many of them are so degraded that you couldn't play them.
It wasn't later that they came up with the turning images to sound approach but we captured many of those original pictures.
Second, the sheer volume of stuff was nuts. The Library had warehouses of uncatalogued things sitting around without a real plan to log them, let alone digitize them.
While we had Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, the more fascinating thing about those is that copyright law at the time didn't have a way to address "moving pictures" so they did the only thing they could: copyrights on each individual frame. Yes, seriously. Luckily, at that point, it was only 15fps and movies were short.
Edison's work got all the attention but there were tons more like the ones in this article that were simply lost to time.
It's not just century-old movies, many much more recent movies which were available on DVD are almost impossible to find now that everything is to the whim of streamers and online services.
> A more immediate way of getting some action would be to talk to some of the directors with films on the list and encourage them to get their movies released digitally. Ron Howard and James Cameron are obvious candidates.
Interesting side note: a couple of years back, I wanted to buy The Abyss on blu-ray. When I went to look, all I could find were DVD versions and a crappy fake blu-ray version where someone had just ripped a DVD and transferred it to blu-ray (seriously).
After a bit of digging, I came to find out that there is no blu-ray version of The Abyss because (basically) Cameron has been holding it up. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with him wanting to oversee it personally, yet simultaneously never bothering to actually bother to get it done.
Looked again just now and supposedly the work has finally been done (?) and it was to be available last month, yet as of right now it's not available on amazon, so who knows..
I've been hoping for the 4K remaster to be finished and end up in theatres, hopefully as a nice director's cut and maybe even in an old school non-widescreen IMAX theatre. I remember 20 years ago being so excited to buy and watch a 4:3 DVD of The Abyss. It was right around the time that widescreen was equated to "good", but The Abyss was shot in 4:3 and it was a rare case where the widescreen version was the "pan and scan" version.
Highly recommend the documentary about shooting the film if you're a fan[1]. It's a film that could never be made in the same way today. The rat breathing an oxygen rich liquid scene was real (not saying this is a good thing) and the stuntwork of actors was even more dangerous.
Is it though? To me, it seems much more to the whim of the content owners. If they choose to not make it available to the streamers, then it's not the streamer's fault for not having it.
To me, it was not obvious until I read the article in full. When I saw the 75% number I thought they only meant the original copy because surely there must exist some form of a copy in some archive somewhere, but I was wrong. There are no copies in existence whatsoever for these 75%, which is a mind-blowingly high number for me. If someone would have asked me I would have said maybe 1%.
I do agree that it's related and that it will likely lead to a similar outcome where new things get lost permanently.
Even worse is that we have music labels intentionally and methodically destroying generations' worth of music with dynamic compression, making despicable "remasters" the only thing available to modern listeners. What happens to the originals? Is anyone tracking their provenance?
I was already familiar with the perils of nitrate, but I never knew distribution patterns were such a big factor in the loss of vintage films.
I have some memories of the concept of "second-run" theaters growing up, but I had no idea there was once such a long-tail network of nth-run cinemas that the total number of prints in distribution would need only be a fraction of modern releases.
There's a lot of dismissive posts in this thread, and I think some people are missing an issue here.
When documenting the history of anything, it's rarely a bad thing to have a lot of data. Here, the preservation of these films is a documentation of history. When we talk about the art form of film, we see the giants and then work backwards. How much has Spielberg, for example, benefitted from being able to watch Kurosawa? Who influenced Kurosawa? Who influenced the people who influenced Kurosawa? Yeah, it's a bit like counting turtles, but since when has adding granularity to our knowledge-base ever been a bad thing? If it turns out that Kurosawa didn't create a technique because someone else did it first, that doesn't matter, because he still did something that synthesized it into something special. Even the giants stood on shoulders.
A 25% retention rate is pretty good compared to the 4000 years of culture that preceded it. Who was the best King Lear in 1842? What made their performance special?
>Who was the best King Lear in 1842? What made their performance special?
There's actually a surprising amount of information about famous stage actors, even going back to the 17th century. There are quite a few written accounts describing specific details of the staging, casts etc.
To answer your question, Samuel Phelps seems to have been the most popular King Lear of that time period. Prior to him, possibly Edmund Kean.
Yeah and additionally, most silent movies were garbage. Even the good ones are total crap by modern standards.
Who would have watched them again? A few weirdos and only a tiny random subset chosen by random criteria. Might as well watch the 25% that was preserved and is waay too high anyway.
Nearly everything I remember as a cultural artifact from the 80s and 90s is gone, except for movies and video games, both of which have been preserved only due to illegal copyright infringement. Nearly every aspect of my online presence and the people who influenced my formative years, things like the local dial-in BBS, some of the Usenet groups, and the many MUDs are all gone, poof, vanished.
I imagine more of human culture has been lost than preserved at nearly every point in history, but as with other commenters, I expect online culture in particular will be lost to memory due to the folly of US copyright law, the US global hegemony (primarily focused on enforcing said laws), and the US being a lynchpin to the early Internet.
Many TV stations would reuse tapes leading to many shows getting lost as well. The BBC routinely deleted content until it changed its archiving policy in 1978. Until then thousands of hours of programming in all genres was deleted.
That’s odd- the first film mentioned by this article (Ben-Hur from 1925), which it describes as completely lost, is not lost, at least according to its wikipedia article. Apparently it was (at least) partly considered lost until being found again in the 80’s. Not sure whether to trust TFA on any other claims now.
MoMA's film library (created in 1935, moved to a special facility in the 90s) now reports that it has 30,000 films in its vaults - including "the Museum’s holdings of 5,000 fragile nitrate films, dating from 1894 to 1951..."
It's fine, Sturgeon's law applies to this just as it applies everything else.
you don't need to keep everything, there does not need to be a frantic effort to obsessively horde every single thing ever created, things get lost, room is made for new things to be made.
You do however want to make an effort to save the 10 percent of things that are actually any good.
It's amazing how literally every major copyright proponent doesn't really care about the things that actually make copyright possible - the actual works themselves. Time and time again, they've shown disrespect for authors and creators when they treat works as a means to an end. They're not in it for the art of it, they're in it for the money of it.
This has been happening for almost a century at this point, just in the realm of moving pictures. Never forget the entire Dumont library being dumped in the upper New York Bay just because they didn't want to store them.
The article claims the preservation wave started in the 1960s.
That being said, home video certainly made preservation a lot easier, if only because rather than a select few copies being made for movie theaters you now were making possibly millions for home consumers. That, and extremely flammable/degradable media was not suitable for home use.
Early on films were make on explosive celluloid base that was by no means durable, those were replaced by ‘safety film’ on acetate bases.
Around the 1980s there was a perceived crisis about the fading of color film, Martin Scorsese was one of the leaders in that movement. People had all kinds of ideas about how to preserve color film but it was eventually realized you could keep in the freezer for hundreds of years without fading.
And yet "reaction" videos with someone stealing content and looking bored in the bottom left of your screen will still be available for everyone for the ages to come.
The film is a meditation on old, decaying silent films, featuring segments of earlier movies re-edited and integrated into a new narrative. Critic Glen Kenny described Decasia as an "abstract narrative about mortality in all of its manifestations."
What percentage of generational histories and educational or simply entertaining stories from the, let's just narrow it down to the indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest, have been lost due to disease and colonialism?
How far back did some of those stories go, how many thousands of years?
The lost Hollywood stories are just variations of archetypical tales presented in a different medium, sometimes superbly. Moving pictures were certainly novel, at the time, but in the context of tens of thousands of years of human existence I find that I don't really care.
Up-triangle'd anyway, for those who do care, and because it's a story about stories.
by the 40s, most radio drama was not any of those things, at least not to an offensive degree. I've only seen a few very old movies and caricatures are annoying, but it's a product of the time. There's no reason to wipe it off the planet.
I'm hearing the "Old Radio" archives, and Dimension X it's highly recommended for what it was for its era. Remember: the sci-fi folks mostly were the progressive ones, just look at Star Trek from the 60's. Or The Twilight Zone from the 50's.
When discussing the era of scientific racism, it's a mistake to assume that interest in science correlated with socially progressive beliefs, in the modern sense of progress.
It depends on the artwork. Most pulp and scifi comics were progressive and "scientific racism" had no sense from a huge intergalactic biology review. Wars? yes, OFC.
Stereotypes? Back and forth. Cultures were far more isolated back in the day and the typical " 'murican Southern/Chicagoan journalist/NYC cop" on a Franco-Belgian comic-book was given as a fact.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
If IP were less restricted, I could envision hundreds of derivative works for each film; nobody would know whether Han shot first; Ted Turner would colorize the first 20 minutes of "The Wizard of Oz", and my mom would star in "Ghostbusters (1984)".
There's a long-standing convention of "golden age" meaning the first age, when an art came into its own. A "silver age" follows if there's a revolution in the art, often with some sort of decline between.
Who needs Rome? Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas is much better...
Seriously, of all the modern movies to pick, you choose one who's entire shtick is referencing and celebrating (or commercially exploiting) memory of the old movies you mean to denigrate with this comparison?
Is it really a big deal that some really old movies are lost ... sorry but I just don't see why ...
I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.
Forgetting is also a gift - it is is foolish to think that you have to preserve everything.
I think it is a much bigger problem that too much of today's photos and videos are preserved.
Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset.
The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.
“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” I find that more compelling than, “Erase the past so we can build again.”
The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation. If we remember the past we can build on it — standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say — rather than re-finding old mistakes.
Old movies teach us about (of course) old movies, and that’s interesting for anyone learning the art. Even in very dated art there is often something worth copying, stealing, learning from.
Old movies teach us about ourselves, and in a more visceral way than any other art form. Some of those old movies show cultural context in a way that’s difficult to document — clothes, street signs, mannerisms, slang.
There are already plenty of forces intent upon the destruction of old cultural artifacts, from Egyptian pharaohs breaking monuments of prior rulers, to the burning of the library at Alexandria, to the looting of the Baghdad museums in the Gulf War. That doesn’t even account for the primary killers of old culture: mildew, insects, rot, loss, indifference, repurposing.
It’s a miracle when any old culture survives. It’s a good thing.
> The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation.
At first glance this makes sense, but then if that was really the case, why are we losing cultural artifacts and not protecting them..? Why is copyright law continuing to be weaponized to such an extent..? Maybe what culture “was” has changed and modern culture is just one of ownership and consumerism.
While i somewhat agree with you, i do not share your optimism. We already have lots of information to prevent from repeating errors from the past. Yet, more than i'd like seem to creep out of the shadows right now.
And I'm not even talking about the intrinsic value (or lack thereof) of a cultural item.
That is a common attitude. Consider also that “worth” is relative. I’d burn the Mona Lisa for heat to keep my family alive, but that doesn’t mean it has no worth.
The writer & engraver William Blake, one of the most influential artists of the last few centuries, was so poor that he had to melt down his copper printing plates once he’d used them. He couldn’t afford to buy more copper. Blake’s technique was unique in all of printing, and a little insane, and fantastically detailed. Having all his original plates would be glorious.
So was it that those plates were worth nothing? Not at all. He had to feed his family.
And note that no one — no one at all — is arguing to “remember every single pointless thing.” That’s a straw man. You’ll have better discussions if you avoid such things.
Imagine that Mona Lisa was lost shortly after its creation ... do you think we would not have something else like Mona Lisa in its place?
Society created the value of Mona Lisa out of nothing. It is not such a unique thing - there are tens of thousands of paintings that could be just as valuable.
OK and saving a bunch of film reels or tens of thousands of Mona Lisas takes a tiny amount of space in a salt mine warehouse or some megabytes or gigabytes taking literally zero space. It's not a zero-sum game where disposing of this stuff makes more room for future artists.
Lots of things have been lost because people didn't consider them worth paper.
What is important ends up being very strange. Ephemera become _very_ important.
For example, how did women care for their hair during Victorian times? Did they wash their hair? What with? Lye soap is really strong, and they didn't have detergent based shampoos.
So, what did they use?
That example came to mind because it was the focus of one of the "live a while in the shoes of someone from time X" on TV. It was a huge thing for the women of the house to be able to care for their hair, and no one knew how it was done!
What we consider useless to keep now may become extremely important to a future historian.
Some of the most valuable finds in terms of learning about past societies have been very ordinary things: the everyday objects that we make, use, and keep says so much about us that doesn't get put into official records.
Archival isn't just for entertainment. It's for research, for history, and for remembering and understanding where we've come from.
There's a line in an old Time Team episode about how Phil Harding [I think] had found one of the most exciting things an archaeologist could find: [Totally deadpan] "A ditch."
Indeed, the things that make good historical evidence are very frequently rather counter-intuitive.
how about the current era, where every human generates thousands of photos per year ... is that a history worth remembering and will it help where we've come from?
I am not saying to not study history, I am saying storing everything is probably worse than storing half of it.
Aside from the pictures of the insides of purses or completely blurry and incomprehensible ones, yeah, it's worth remembering, and it will help understand where we've come from if we can preserve it for the next few centuries. Especially since so much of it is time- and geo-tagged. That kind of dataset is an absolute gold mine for people studying history.
Seriously, talk to some people whose field this is, or at least look up some things by or about them.
> I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.
While I agree that preserving through something through time does take intentional effort I disagree that this acts as a 'quality' filter. What we've received from the past comes to us through a surprising amount of accidents, or close scrapes. Beowulf exists now in millions of copies but the original is a single, damaged codex. Was Beowulf worth preserving more than the other, now lost oral poems of that era? Gilgamesh was popular in the ancient world and was told and retold, yet we still don't have and may never have a complete Gilgamesh. Is it not worth preserving? It may be, through sheer blind luck, that in 10,000 years some trade paperback you have in your home right now will be the only written example of your native tongue. Is all the literature composed in your tongue not worth preserving?
> The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.
Are they so new? And, as to how archival practices shape society, I think you need only look at the European Renaissance to see what a rediscovery of the past will do to a people. Or, consider the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Biblical scholarship in the modern era.
Stoker's widow won a lawsuit and all of the copies of Nosferatu were destroyed. Well, all but one. Every copy today has that source, that accidental source, as its ancestor.
"Bothering to preserve" is a terribly blunt filter. Luck (good: a crazed archivist; bad: a nitrate fire) is too fickle to select for the best.
It isn't just the films themselves: often, we have no sense of a given actor's career. We know that they had a huge impact at the time, but we have only secondhand evidence of it.
Couple of these "who cares about old stuff" comments on here and I worry that this is the dark side of the AI revolution; once you're hooked up to the infinite content hose, or Bach faucet, you're adrift from culture as a continuous succession of works by humans engaged in conversation with one another.
I don't know that I'd argue - in the case of cultural artifacts - that time is a quality filter. I'm certainly glad that it seems as much good stuff survives as we have, but we also find lots of interesting things after the fact and in spite of ourselves. We make a decent attempt at archiving things of cultural significance so far as we can assess such things in our own time is about as generous as I'd get.
Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.
In music, at least, I've reluctantly concluded that time is an almost infallible judge. I'm a violist, and we have very little repertoire, so we're always excited when we discover a viola piece among the works of a forgotten or little-known composer from the 19th century or earlier, but almost invariably, it's either mediocre or outright trash. Zelter, Sitt, Ritter, Zitterbart, Firket, Rougnon, — it sounds like I'm making these names up, but I'm not — mediocrities all. As a professor of mine was fond of pointing out to me, "There's a reason we haven't heard _x_," where _x_ is the new find of the day.
I think that was more true when less stuff was being produced, and the cost of keeping a copy was non-zero.
Those things stopped being true ~ 100 years ago, so now we end up with strange filters. For example, a large number of high-value film masters were lost in a single warehouse fire. (Arguably, shorter copyright terms would have prevented that, since distributors and fans would have had geographically distributed backups that the film studio had little financial incentive to maintain).
As a musician, perhaps you can answer this for me.
It seems that people who play a guitar try their hand at composing music. But the people who play violins and other orchestral instruments appear to be satisfied playing other peoples' compositions.
Why is that? Have you tried to compose new viola pieces?
I do compose and make arrangements — and am firmly a mediocrity. In fact, lots of the great composers were violists: Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Britten, Dvorak, and others. Most of them also played a keyboard instrument, which is a useful tool for a composer, but a violist is perfectly placed to understand the orchestra as a whole, and is usually not saddled with too difficult a part, so they can spare some attention.
Also, violinists who composed were very common, but their works tend to display skill rather than profundity. Paganini is a good example: delightful melody, amazing technical displays, but not a lot to sink your teeth into.
I don't play viola or any other orchestra instrument, but do play some guitar, so much of this is just a guess.
I'd guess that a big factor is that guitar is a good solo instrument. It can do melody and chords well. You can get a good full sounding piece of music out of a guitar. Also if you want you can sing while you play so it works great if you want to add words to your composition.
Most orchestra instruments don't really work nearly as well solo. Yes, many classical pieces include solos for various instruments but those solos are meant to be in the context of the orchestra or string quartet or whatever. If all you've got is a lone violinist while that can be beautify it is not going to have the richness that you can get from a lone guitar (or a lone piano). Also for many orchestra instruments singing while playing them might be hard or annoying.
So if I want to try composing for my guitar, I only have to get good enough at composing to compose decent guitar music.
A violist would probably need to get good enough to compose for viola and for at least the rest of a string quartet.
Lots of violin players do composition (and even improvisation!) they just call it a fiddle when they do so!
Less cheekily, the difference you're pointing out is about folk vs classical traditions. Many instruments are strongly associated with one or the other, but the violin is one of few that exists in both.
> Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.
What would you think of a service, that when you take a photograph that is beautiful, unique and moving for you and say you want to share it with someone else - would pop in and would should an image just like it - only a better with some additional elements that make it even more breathtaking - taken by someone else and would recommend you to send that
Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.