Who owns history? How historical footage is hidden and monetised [video]

I suppose things like this are why people hesitate to publish under CC0: it sounds great from an ideological perspective, it's much more difficult when you realize how little control it leaves you with.

Moving the link back to the creator's site will make user experience worse.

Several national libraries have done this for ~500 years by now with no end in sight.

the problem today is that there is to much content to collect it all, but i believe something like the MLK speech should have a copy in the library. apparently any US publisher is still required to send two copies of each publication to the library.

I will note that "who pays" is a problem even before the content hits the public domain. What you're arguing was specifically one of the arguments used to justify the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[0]. Unfortunately, copyright is the wrong tool for the job. It merely says that if you produce a work someone wants to buy, then they have to buy a copy of it from the person who made the work.

The problem is, the vast majority of old works are not in any kind of demand. Congress and the EU made sure that copyright would vastly outlive the actual commercial lifespan of the work. So marginal[1] increases in term length do not result in marginal increases in preservation. Because nobody is going to pay for it regardless. In fact, nobody is even going to be aware that the work in question even exists.

The way that archival works nowadays is that you preserve everything you can get your hands on. Because it's the common garbage that nobody cares about that is the most likely to be lost. Any market-based solution like copyright is likely to miss such works.

[0] Derisively called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, due to Disney lobbying for it, even though it was primarily started by the EU wanting everyone to adopt Germany's copyright term lengths

[1] In the economics sense. e.g. "on the margin, does adding one more year of copyright result in one more work preserved"

Maintenance of a digital archive? Just put it out there with no legal threats or restrictions and let the right people download it once or twice. It'll last forever. Instead, everything is tied up in restricted access, legal knots or just the impression of legal knots. Eventually local hard drives will be as illegal as the RIAA wanted to make blank cassette tapes. All of your data will have to be in clouds managed by state-intimate monopolies to insure future legal compliance.

Datahoarders, academics, filmmakers and others would build communities around peer-to-peer film archives with no legal encumbrances.

https://twitter.com/RichardMisek/status/1647622806899765251

80mb low res version downloaded from vimeo.

Does anyone else see the irony of a non-shared doc about how Getty is not sharing?

who had their conviction overturned, but was left to rot in jail.