Music industry has been... not great with licensing and archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-issues of that music today that only exist because of independent labels sourcing from those archives.
If the music industry had had its way they would have been done with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten, having moved on to the next crop.
Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior art.
Locusts. Good analogy.
AI will improve this situation on the graphics side, perhaps with some sort of game container that emulates older environments well (Proton, anyone?) we'll see more re-releases.
And "sell small files for $1 or $5 without spending much money to set up the store" is a solved problem.
There are thousands of folks that both want and want to do this work.
Reference please? Genuine question. As far as I know, libraries have very little in the way of special privileges outside of some specific rights in the analog realm which don't really apply in digital where first sale doctrine also doesn't apply.
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-10-28/pdf/2024-2...
It's not about what people find pleasing today, it's about archiving and preserving an important part of our (digital) history. Videogames of the past were a big thing.
And videogames, much like music, must be playable to be truly preserved.
Imagine someone going "I don't get why it's worth preserving ancient Egyptian artifacts, people these days don't enjoy that kind of thing anymore".
One of the most prolific indie developers of recent years (David Szymanski) has basically all of his games looking like they came out of PS1/early 3D accelerator days. And he isn't alone, there are many games that have midlate 90s / very early 2000s looks. There are also a ton of horror games that use exaggerated PS1-styled graphics with bit crunched filtering, strong dithering effects, etc (wobbly low poly environments where you can barely make out what you are looking at are giving horror vibes basically for free :-P).
This is something i've been saying for a long time now: if you can point at a game and say "this looks like a PS1/PS2/3/4/5/NES/SNES/DOS/Win95/etc game" then this means there are enough visual characteristics to define such games and thus you are really pointing at a visual style - something that people will use at some point in the future even when the technical limitations that birthed the style aren't there anymore (which means that some games may give the feel of that style but not really be bound by the actual limitations).
anybody else remember abandonware games??
I was active in their forums back in 2004. I still remember all the fuss when the admin/owner (going by nickname Underdogs) was "outed" to be a woman (she helped out herself, it wasn't a hostile thing). 2004 was a time when people could still be surprised that a woman was leading a major online project... wow. The past is indeed "a foreign country"!
> "They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective."
Music execs are in the business of selling music. The less music is available in the wild, the better for them.
When they started working on B5 The Lost Tales, WB had lost all of the digital files.
I see this scenario play out constantly:
1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware.
2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings.
3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on.
4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version.
Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days.
Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping.
The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.
They probably just used now-outdated practices before those practices were outdated. This happened in the past, remember. Sure, the cloud is a thing today, but was the cloud such a thing 5, 10, 20 years ago? Do you really think it's their fault for not knowing in advance how much of a thing the cloud would one day become? Oh, how outdated. Sheesh.
Yes, yes, and no.
For example, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/908:_The_Cloud is from 2011.
Old animation though I wouldn't necessarily expect to only have been 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I wouldn't expect to be scolded for not using the cloud.
Clouds have user accounts too. I have seen dead links to documents in a former employees space on sharepoint, confluence, and google docs.
Who knows what happens when I've shuffled away from my current company.
Dead links are also incredibly common, particularly because we are on our nth port from sharepoint to confluence to whatever back to sharepoint. Generally, because C levels don't want to pay for this year's price hike.
I still think B5 ships are some of the best in all of Scifi.
(I also like the Lexx spaceship, though the series was somewhat of a mess)
Expanse ships (at least where I'm at in the book series and show - kind of early) are a lot closer to current human tech of course. In B5 humanity had tech that was mostly believable (still used rotating mass for gravity), but you got to see some very unique looking ships from the other species like the Minbari and Shadows that truly looked alien and unsettling.
Destruction is the one most people think of. The last tape is destroyed, or someone nukes everything in S3. Policies normally save this from happening, bit not always. (I note that lawyers are pretty good at saving things because of discovery, so perhaps corporations should sue themselves more often /s)
Discoverability is when the data is there, but noone knows where it is. This is your classic corpo Sharepoint/teams/slack problem. There was a chat, once, with some shared files, from their onedrive, but the last person who remembered where was laid off a year ago and...well, that data is effectively lost. I dont think we have great solutions here except writing even more things down and hoping that everyone follows rules like keeping all files in one place
The last case is where the data is located, but noone can vouch for it any more. Internal wiki pages are notorious here. People post about, say, some sharp edge they uncovered, and the page sits there for all eternity. You discover it years later. Can you trust it? Is there anyone who knows why the page still exists? It blocks the synthesis of what you know with what the author knew.
But to me this is like arguing a swarm of locusts are going to one day regret that they destroyed so many fields of crops.