Almost three quarters of the golden age of Hollywood has been lost

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.

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.

Sadly pirates are a critical piece of media preservation.

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).

It is not illegal to own and preserve media which is still under copyright. IP is not the problem, the problem is nobody cared until it was too late.

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.

> 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.

Someone's gunna lose the private key for all that DRM media and then whoops.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0RXfGGMGPE

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).

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.

Copyright does not inhibit archiving. The problems begin when people want to distribute those archives.

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.

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

This is what capitalism would have happen to the bulk of culture.

> Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades, it was meant to be ephemeral topical entertainment, and functionally intended to be disposable.

As with Pompeii graffiti and warehouse cuneiform tally tablets, from the anthropological perspective, the ephemeral is interesting.

Old entertainment that seems alien has a lot to offer for understanding culture that was.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before that it was 20 years of BBS content that is sadly mostly lost.

There's definitely a lot lost from the era of personal home pages.

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.

Perhaps non-human entities will lament that. Or perhaps humans who are leveraging more advanced search/discovery tools to look for specific things.

Otherwise, there is too much content for anyone to view.

> 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.

>everything is to the whim of streamers

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.

> 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..

That's not the same thing. The article is talking about movies that are completely lost. No-one has a backup and no-one will ever see them again.

Posted 5 years ago, and even the list of movies he cataloged is now gone - the Google sheet link is dead.

Someone downvoted that? WTF?

My prime example of a toxic remaster is Star Wars.

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.

Some things must just go away.

>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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Phelps

Hello fellow baconeer. Fancy meeting you in a thread like this ;)

This one is interesting in that most or all audio was recovered, and some episodes are recreated by animators.

The article doesn't say that Ben-Hur was lost. It says that another movie, The Devil Dancer, by the same director was lost.

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.

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)".

It's just a conveniention as far as I am aware. Similar one is applied to comics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age

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?

Are you trolling? Metropolis is AMAZING and had an important role in WWII.

“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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset.

It also takes away future generations' knowledge that such a phenomenal photo can be taken and potentially the means to do so.

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.