Similar losses, though less dramatic and less all at once, have plagued the software industry too and in particular video games. An enormous amount of source code and assets for stuff made in the 80s and 90s in particular has been lost for good, which makes it far more difficult to preserve and update them. If there is some tiny silver lining possible out of these modern Library of Alexandria permanent destruction of cultural heritage events, it's that they might ultimately help push back against the IP maximalists and towards better using digital advances for promoting science and the arts too. Beyond reductions in term back towards something more sane (though attribution should perhaps be split off), it would also be good to see a requirement that all sources to produce a work must be submitted, encrypted, to the Library of Congress (or similar) in order to qualify for copyright protection. Then they could be preserved and released once the work enters public domain (or if otherwise lost the copyright holder could request a copy for a fee).

Back when copyright was purely a product of the written word the ultimate master information was also by definition included in every copy. It would spread as part of sales, and upon leaving the period of monopoly could then directly be utilized and fully contribute to further advanced culture. But over time we've lost that without the laws adapting in turn, which has resulted in real permanent losses.

Also, kudos to the Times for going back and investigating this and helping bring it more to light, including explicitly calling out their own lacking coverage at the time. That it was covered up so much by an organization that has helped directly lobby for more protection is salt in the wound.

>A skeptic might argue that this is as it should be. In the 140-odd years since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, countless recordings have been made under the auspices of record companies. To conserve anything close to all those recordings has proved impossible; it may not even be desirable. The caretaking of canonical material, the Bings and Billies and Nirvanas, must naturally take priority. To ask that the same level of attention be lavished on all music, including stuff that holds interest only for obscurantists, is to demand a preservation standard that prevails in no other area of culture. If the sole vestiges of thousands of old recordings are a few stray 45s lining the shelves of collectors — perhaps that’s not a cultural tragedy, perhaps that’s a commercial-art ecosystem functioning properly.

This sounds like an argument for all of that having been moved into the PD then long since and then letting culture at large take a shot at it all.