The preservation of knowledge is highly important to the development of arts, culture, and science. Without the preservation of knowledge, all forms of teaching would be severely handicapped, and our growth in every discipline important to the meeting of our ever-evolving needs would be severely shunted. This preservation, in its organized and intentional form, is given the moniker “archiving”. Archivists are responsible for the collection and preservation of vast amounts of data. This data can take many forms, including, but not limited to, books, magazines, movies, historical artifacts, and biological specimens.
For most of the last several hundred years archive collection was subject to costly physical limitations, and thus almost exclusively limited to large institutional collections. Famous libraries include the Smithsonian Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Louvre. Many works and pieces held in these archives are maintained in tightly controlled conditions to prevent degradation of the collection, but these do not come at a small cost.
Although archiving programs can be well funded, information is still frequently lost, especially in the case of private archives. Works are frequently destroyed by accidents or natural disasters, the deterioration of the medium they were created on, and private firms who do not wish to incur the expense of maintaining an archive.
All three of these are exemplified by the preservation of many American silent films produced 1912-1929. In 2013, the Library of Congress found that only 25% of films from that era survive today. This is due to many factors, the foremost of which was the fact that movies were produced on a nitrate film, which was highly vulnerable to fire, and many of the studio’s own archives literally went up in flames. Movies were also frequently recorded over, as film was prohibitively expensive, and studios did not want to pay the high costs of archiving their films.
At this time piracy was almost non-existent. While formal copyright laws have existed since 1710, they served almost exclusively as punitive measures against producers, not consumers. The crime was in the unlicensed production and sale of a work, not in its consumption.
However, this paradigm was fundamentally changed by the creation of the internet, and the takeover of the digital age, due to two primary factors that acted in concert.
The first was the simplicity and high quality of copying. While the tradition of reproducing works has existed for millennia, this replication was frequently a long and arduous process or introduced significant losses in quality to the work. Significant developments, such as the Gutenberg press, did truly revolutionize their mediums with their inexpensive and efficient production, but many other avenues of human expression still suffered from the complexity of copying.
This was forever changed with the advent of the computer. Now, information on a broad range of mediums could be simply copied between digital systems, with minimal to no loss in the quality of data, at a very low cost. This especially changed the vast archives of personal pictures and films, which had quantitative limits on reproduction due to the inferior nature of technology used and the expensive development process.
Advancing the significance of this advance was the formation of the internet, and the enormous distribution potential it contained. Humans had a level of access to an enormous volume of material, surpassing anything seen before. Works of all kinds could be shared across tremendous distances with little wait or risk of damage, and it changed the way users interacted with data.
This, in combination with revolutions in reproduction that the digital age offered, presented an unprecedented number of people the ability to access information at a never-before-seen scale. As millions joined the internet to experience these benefits, the information it contained also grew. Quickly, the web became the largest collection of human data ever, unrivaled in both size and scale.
The quantity of information, alongside the revolutions in copying presented by the digital age and the simplicity of sharing, led to an unrivaled opportunity for the many amateur archivists across the planet. With relatively inexpensive technology and software, vast amounts of data could be stored by those without the billion-dollar budget of the Smithsonian.
However, many of these would-be amateur archivists were actually considered thieves. As services like Limewire exploded in popularity, millions of albums were downloaded onto personal devices across the world. While these works were often downloaded for personal enjoyment, they still served to create a massive amount of redundancy, while simultaneously increasing access to information, essentially preserving and spreading the works. Embodying this, Radiohead, an English alt-rock band renowned for their experimentation, released their 2007 album In Rainbows as a direct-download, pay-what-you-want model. According to Tom Yorke, a band member, that album made the group members significantly more than any other Radiohead album.
Importantly, the computer and internet transformation not only represented a significant shift in the amount of data that could be collected and maintained but also signalled a larger change in the safety of that data. In archiving, where malicious actors are considered a minor threat when compared to circumstances that often amount to bad luck, redundancy is key. Instead of a few major archives who maintain works, now millions of individuals could store these works, creating a number of copies which accidents or natural disasters would be exceedingly hard-pressed to destroy.
Almost equally importantly, this advancement greatly democratized access to information. Instead of archive copies being restricted to relatively few locations, where travel or access might be expensive or restricted, all that was required was internet access. While this can still be difficult for some demographics, it was a massive improvement over the past.
This redundancy, and the democratization that came alongside it, was almost immediately threatened by entertainment monopolies across the world. Seeing this storage of information simply as a reduction in their profits, they quickly began lobbying for comprehensive copyright laws and using invasive Digital Rights Management technologies.
Because of their massive power, draconian copyright laws were rapidly enacted to legally “protect” this work from being saved, allowing companies to sue, or otherwise legally threaten, individuals and institutions who distribute copies of these works. Embodying this ethos, Nintendo is well known for exorbitant copyright claims on games and software that is no longer even available for purchase. Even massive institutions, like the Internet Archive, a repository of a wide variety of online content, are frequently threatened with legal action. Today, these archives are massively important for many kinds of work, including authoring these articles.
Despite these extreme copyright measures, piracy has continued, and even flourished in recent years as streaming services slowly enshittify. While entertainment monopolies will continue to press for legislation that restricts the rights of consumers in favour of corporations, there still exists a strong ethical argument that piracy should continue, if only to guarantee the continued existence of the thousands of human works that remain at the behest of commercial interests.
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