“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis
Industry pros sweat the possibility that many digital files will eventually become unusable — an archival tragedy reminiscent of the celluloid era.
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
I'm on a private tracker (pejoratively known as a "piracy site") that specialises in obscure films and documentaries - no mainstream, big studio films are allowed. It is an archive that I am happy to be a part of... and I definitely consider it to be an "archive"; corporations are not going to be interested in maintaining anything that's not profitable. I regularly upload queer films that are difficult to get hold of and I'm happy that they are held on the computers of others in case someone, someday, would like to watch them.
Just gonna add that archives like this are absolutely vital for students too. During a module on animation, which included an historical/contextual research component, I relied heavily on "piracy" to source pretty much everything I looked at from the 1930s onwards - basically everything that was too new to have entered the public domain, but too old/unpopular/obscure to be readily available in a "legal" manner. Most of my fellow students didn't go past 1928, and they lost marks in that assignment as a result. I did not volunteer information about my sources for these files, and the teachers wisely opted not to ask. 😅
I'm an ex-filmmaker and would be interested in your private tracker if u wanted to DM it to me.
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?
This. A thousand times.
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.
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.
