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Comment by sroerick | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a teensy bit of film background, I have to disagree. The number of early Hollywood films that were lost is astounding. This is a massive part of our visual history that is completely gone. It will never be restored.

With the current environment on the internet, with DRM'd video, music and text, I have to assume that we will lose far more from this time period than we ever had before.

While I don't pirate things (I'd rather just consume Creative Commons and Public Domain content), I wholehartedly support people who are trying to archive the things that are part of our collective culture. When I have kids, I'd like to be able to show them where they came from.

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I'm not against reproduction if care is taken to preserve what can be preserved, as close to the original as possible while giving credit, compensating creators, etc. In your example, I think reproduction/conservation technology was available but the studios couldn't justify spending the time/money it would cost to preserve their entire library. Who would have paid for that? I don't know. Supposedly, half of Van Gogh's entire lifetime output was burned because he was too poor to find a place to store it. At the same time, I'd rather see a bug-eaten Van Gogh with fugitive reds long faded away, than a flat, lifeless high-def copy. I suppose it's a complex subject and each work is unique. Sometimes I'm thrilled when I can find an old page in "Wayback Machine" but what they manage to save is typically broken and low quality.

I'm having a little trouble understanding your perspective. Copying films is good, letting bugs eat Van Gogh is good, but copying websites is bad?

Well, luckily, with digital technology, we can copy things flawlessly with very little cost. Unfortunately, most content creators are still stuck trying to adapt physical distribution models to the information age, which is why we're stuck with DRM. You can't say "The Medium is the Message" and then get angry because you're producing content for a medium that is infinately copyable.

We need to move to a model of perceiving data as holographic. Especially with the advent of blockchain technology, we're increasingly moving to a model where every node in a network contains the entire network. Trying to adapt 20th century Disney copyright to that paradigm is stupid.

> I'd rather see a bug-eaten Van Gogh with fugitive reds long faded away, than a flat, lifeless high-def copy

The beauty of perfect copies is that you can create your own faded version if you want, and other people can have their own perfect or artificially aged version too. You can't do it the other way.

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