This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.
Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.
Eh, I feel like we've almost fully gotten away from bit-rot. Bit-rot was a problem because individuals don't bother to go to the effort of constant IT administration, and don't have the economies of scale required to afford good data redundancy.
But individuals don't have to back things up "personally" any more. With one command, I can send three copies of any file to three object-storage providers. Each one (according to the Dynamo architecture, which they mostly all implement) is holding 17 copies of the data on 17 shards, and replaces copies from the good ones whenever they go bad. Each provider's copies only exist in one region, but the region is different for each provider selected. As individual object-storage providers die, I can find new ones and sync my data over from the surviving ones. As long as "cloud [redundant] object storage" as a concept exists, I won't have to do much at all to ensure continued integrity of my data. All the details—including porting my data to new physical substrates when old formats die—are being handled under the abstraction, and converted into (tiny!) monthly fees that are lower than what even a zero-redundancy tape library would cost me.
And, of course, the data I'm sending is encrypted, and not even with a symmetric key, but rather a PKI key where the decryption half of the key is held in cold storage (i.e. in hardcopy base64 in a safety deposit box at a bank; and a few other places.) If I'm uploading rips of something copyrighted, nobody will ever know that but me. I'll be able to get the data back out when the time comes to dust it off and share it.
The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
If you want more, look either of them up.
Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available.
I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable.
Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.
It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
Yes, I just noticed I accidentally dropped the "of thousands" part while writing my comments.
It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups.
But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the site. RIP
People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.
I sure hope the community can be revived.
There's a lot more bandwidth and cheap storage today than 10 years ago. I'd love to be able to contribute and share to it.
I so dearly hope this is true for other sites like What.CD
The FIFA games usually have licenses to use the teams and player names. and lots of licensed music.
I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.
Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit.
What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.
Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.
A lot of it was about album collecting which frankly is not working the same anymore
Personally I am sad iOS poorly supports listening mixes plus Soundcloud slowly destroying itself...
Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.
Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.
We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.
This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours worth of work by people who simply love music and wanted to share that love with other enthusiasts, creating some of the richest catalogues of music and music metadata the world has ever seen. And then it all was destroyed.
And this was true for many other topics of interest too.
We have burned many digital libraries in the last few decades, and we will probably continue to do so for a while longer.