Hacker News Reader

Comment by hf | Hacker News Reader

An impressive collection to be sure. Slightly hyperbolical, the British Pathé archive puts it thusly:

"This archive is a treasure trove unrivalled in historical and cultural significance that should never be forgotten."[0]

However, I am left wondering why "[u]ploading the films to YouTube seemed like the best way to make sure of that." Perhaps fittingly, there's no clear indication which licence, if any, is applicable.

What could've possibly impeded a parallel upload to the Internet Archive?

[0] https://britishpathe.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/british-pathe-...

View on HN

I don't know how much hyperbole there is in that statement, really - it's a humungous pile of material, and even if the licensing terms aren't totally clear, it's still available for anyone to watch - and moreover, on Youtube, it's available to your grandparents, your children, your technophobe cousin - anyone who owns a smartphone and has successfully watched videos of cats falling over.

Tucking it away on archive.org might have been more palatable to the likes of us, but none of the above would ever be likely to stumble across it there.

[edit: my point is, yes, it would ideally have been put in both places - but if they're only going to put it in one place, I'm happier that it's Youtube than I would have been were it archive.org]

> on Youtube, it's available to your grandparents, your children, your technophobe cousin

Youtube is not an archival website!

> anyone who owns a smartphone and has successfully watched videos of cats falling over

Youtube enables country-specific censorship and let's the media industry arbritrarily block content.

Youtube is a commercial, for-profit. It is not a company I would ever consider for archival purposes. For maximum publicity it is the logical choice though.

Pathe has their own archive which they are making available to the public using the most accessible method. Why would they upload their archive to another archive?

to avoid losing everything if their archive is destroyed.

It happened to a musician whose studio got destroyed by fire and he got most of his work back from archive.org

it's called offsite backup of some sort and it is really smart to do. Providing you want to share its content with the world, archive.org is a good place to mirror your archive.

So you are suggesting that you think Pathe has never archived their entire collection in a safe and redundant way? No offense to your strawman musician but there is quite a gulf in their approach to business.

It's rivalled by http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/12/16/welcome-the-british-lib...

And the same argument applies - why flickr? Or at least, why only flickr? Executives not willing to give up control is the answer. It's difficult for people who generally make a living from renting access to the public to imagine releasing something in a way that they couldn't revoke later. It's a major break from that possessive thinking to even release the stuff to a third party rather than commission some monstrous UI for their own site.

If you want it in the public domain, give it to archive.org or make torrents. The public will do the uploading to youtube and flickr.

For images of historical significance, the Wikimedia Commons is a good place too. Germany's Bundesarchiv has a lot of images there:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv

The British Library doesn't rent its collections - it isn't a profit making body.

The British Library charges extra if you want to reprint or republish pages from their out-of-copyright books and manuscripts. They also assert new copyrights when they photograph or microfilm things.

Greg is right. I am writing a book on the history of the southwest corner of modern China and saw an exhibition in the British Museum of British Library held historical copperplate prints produced in France for a Chinese emperor in the Ming Dynasty of his campaigns in the area (eg. the spectacular tropical/karst landscape pacification of Annam, or modern day north Vietnam). There are about 5 of these things I'm interested in, and the bastards wanted ~500GBP per image to photograph them for me for research purposes, with an explicitly threatening legal statement that this would grant no republishing rights. I mean, come on! Talk about holding the world's heritage hostage!

PS. I believe they obtained the pieces by invading Beijing... on the then Qing dynasty government's ever-so-serious provocation of refusing to issue free trading rights to foreign nations, in England's case mostly to distribute vast quantities of cut-rate opium produced in slave-like conditions by its Indian subjects to the Chinese population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War

The very nature of archive suggests they will be filed away and forgotten by most — just as much of archive.org's content already is. I personally love it but if you want people to engage with your content, that is not the place to put it. It's like the stacks versus a window display for books — either way they're accessible, but one is for keeping and the other for exposing.

Edit: I hasten to add that a parallel upload would be a great idea, and you should suggest it to Mediakraft, the company handling the material. Their work is ongoing and an archive.org page would be a highly appropriate addition.

Not true. My research suggests that once it has been archives, provided that copyright is not an issue, the material will be reused in useful ways.

see: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/mit-ec...

If they wanted people to engage with their content, they would have licensed it freely. They're just using this as free advertising for their paid licensing project.

Actually, they dont really need to upload to archive.org to make it reusable. Youtube has the option to place this material under a liberal CC license. The least they can do is change the license so that this material is then free for reuse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com