Re: [ARSCLIST] Copyright and hard drives

["Copeland, Peter" <Peter.Copeland@xxxxx>]

Dear All,
    Sorry to open another can of worms on this subject, but I have the
following objection to using hard drives for "serious archival work" (which
I consider different from *exploitation* work)!
    As far as I know, all hard drives (and indeed DLT and its rivals)
involve *software*, and there is always copyright in software. This includes
both the error-correction system and the formatting of the medium.
    A couple of months ago, we heard about California introducing
*permanent* copyright for some purposes, which might mean ARSC members in
that unhappy place would *never* be able to reproduce sounds from
software-controlled media when the hardware fails. Even if it were possible
to import legal copies of the software from somewhere else, it would have
been "compiled" for a particular microprocessor (for example Intel or
Motorola), and it seems very unlikely that such chips would be available in
fifty years' time, which is the term for software here in the United
Kingdom. This problem can only be circumvented by having access to the
"source code" (written in a standardised computer language), and then buying
"compiler" software for new generations of microprocessors. (The compilers
will also be copyright, of course!)
    In my view, the solution is to use only "open standards" for storing
sound. This is why the British Library Sound Archive chose "Red Book" CD-R
discs; when the Philips/Sony patents for CDs expired, it became such an
"open standard". (And the same technology is familiar to users for on-site
access). When other sampling-frequencies or bit-resolutions need to be
stored, I know my successor is thinking in terms of Broadcast Wave format
(like Sue Salinger), which again is an open standard.
Peter Copeland

-----Original Message-----
From: Joel Bresler [mailto:joel.br@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 05 March 2003 03:19
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Archiving to hard drive

Sue wrote:

>You're likely to have to migrate off the cd's or server at some point in
>the near future...

Thanks for the helpful post. Once the music is on a server (presumably on a
hard disk) why would it necessarily need to be migrated? SCSI drives have
built in error correction, and the data could be mirrored on another hard
disk for security. Isn't this the most likely long-term data storage
solution, bar none?

Best,

Joel


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