This was why what.cd was sublime (and its loss a travesty I haven't yet recovered from) -- it was a peerlessly extensive archive with uncompromisingly strict curation of metadata and content alike.
Wanton downloading was not tolerated; it wasn't a site meant to avoid paying for music; it was a project meant to build an archive -- that there was no payment involved was incidental. You had to contribute to download: either you got buffer via leaving your torrent client on with a fast internet connection, or you got buffer by filling requests (people could pledge some of their buffer to an unfulfilled request to make filling difficult-to-find requests it more attractive). If you wanted to download something and you didn't have enough buffer, you'd either have to wait for your existing stash to generate buffer (via other people requesting it from you) or you'd go in the "requests" tab and buy/lend/obtain and rip the CD in question to fill the request. Between the passionate userbase and this incentive system, over its 9 years, there were a lot of out-of-print albums digitised and distributed for the first time. I spent money on it (for CDs that nobody had uploaded yet) but for the value that it offered me, I'd be willing to pay a lot for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to any copyright/licensing issues.
To see albums fall out of print and become obscure and inaccessible is heart-rending, given that we have the means to archive all of this. It is even more tragic because we won't have forever -- physical media degrades and people die (and their collections get lost or thrown away). To quote Pastor Manul Laphroaig from PoC||GTFO,
> Bitrot will burn libraries with merciless indignity that even Pets Dot Com didn’t deserve. Please mirror—don’t merely link!—pocorgtfo13.pdf and our other issues far and wide, so our articles can help fight the coming flame deluge.
The same holds true for film and television as well; any twentieth century media really. It is a saddening state of affairs that we have the means to built and maintain a global distributed digital library of Alexandria, but not the political will or legal means.
The absurdly long copyright terms are too blame for most part. 2017 is strange in that there are not nearly as many ways of sharing our vast collective libraries of digital or digitized culture as five years ago (e.g., the fall of What.cd), despite a steady increase in storage and bandwidth.
I wonder what will happen next? I'm not very hopeful about copyright reform though.
>The absurdly long copyright terms are too blame for most part.
While I agree that copyright terms are too long, I'm not sure they're the primary villain here. A lot of what we're talking about are works from living artists dating to, say, the 1960s or more recently. That's not what people usually mean when they talk about absurdly long copyright terms.
I agree about film and television. Increasingly, if it's not available on streaming, it doesn't exist. Netflix is letting their DVD back catalog decay to nothing. Which basically leaves Amazon DVD purchases. When something goes out of print, you're stuck with the used market. And if it's never made it to DVD, pretty much forget about it at this point.
The 1960s were 50 years ago though — more than half a lifetime. That falls well outside of what I find a reasonable duration for copyright. Even a limit of 30 years (or perhaps the historical 14 + 14 years) would mean anything published before the 1980s would already be in the public domain by now.
The article hints at the artist simply preferring people to forget some of his older work, and that is his prerogative. But once media takes root in our culture society has its own interests to defend. We would find it really weird to leave out certain works of Shakespeare from a comprehensive omnibus because he wasn't particularly fond of them himself.
Copyright should balance the rights of the author and the needs of society; in its current form that balance is lost.
>We would find it really weird to leave out certain works of Shakespeare from a comprehensive omnibus because he wasn't particularly fond of them himself.
I agree up to a point. On the other hand, artists often destroy or leave instructions to have destroyed upon their death all manner of works (unpublished novels, paintings that were never fully finished to the artist's satisfaction) still in their possession that they aren't happy with or don't want to make public for whatever reason. I really hesitate to say that society has some right to those works that override the desires of their creator.
Oh I don't think we disagree there; no one should be able to force someone to publish their works.
But an artist (and their estate) shouldn't be able to retroactively banish any of their published works from society simply by holding on to their copyrights.
Copyright is a deal made with society; you get to publish your work without fear of anyone else making a profit of it by simply copying your work, but for a limited time. After that it enters the public domain.
> It is a saddening state of affairs that we have the means to built and maintain a global distributed digital library of Alexandria, but not the political will or legal means.
Heck, we don't even have the political will for building local, nondistributed versions, though we have most of the legal means in place (and long copyright terms actually don't hurt it at all.)
All we really need is more legal teeth in the deposit requirement attached to copyright law, and we're there. "Timely deposit ormyou lose copyright protection", with no exceptions, and then the funding to support the resulting repository and make it accessible is all that is needed.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if this is an area where technical & financial investment from a volunteer geek corp, plus librarians & libraries, could create something?
I don't know enough about copyright and how they apply to libraries. It seems to me that they're the right repository for this kind of thing.
A volunteer geek corp has created something. There are huge archives libraries of film, TV, and music. They just aren't legal. One of the sites that has taken what.cd's place is currently sitting at ~477000 albums. Passthepopcorn has 141000 movies in it's collection.
>I don't know enough about copyright and how they apply to libraries. It seems to me that they're the right repository for this kind of thing.
Basically, libraries don't have any special rights with respect to copyright. However, because of first sale doctrine, any repository/library/archive can hold physical instances of a book, record/CD, TV show, or movie that they've bought.
That is more or less the only exemption that exists for archives and libraries [1]. But that does not mean that they can then make that content available beyond their walls.
Even that seems like an improvement over status quo. Plus, having such an archive seems like the sort of thing that could be made irreversibly public should there ever be even a temporary rule change. I feel like some of our political will around copyright has eroded simply due to the fact that we're now habituating to a lessened degree of rights and access.
> I'd be willing to pay a lot for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to any copyright/licensing issues.
Oh my yes. I currently pay Tidal $25/month—$20 because I refuse to believe that in 2017 it is economic to stream 4k video but not lossless audio. And tack on $5 for a family member.
But I am continually annoyed when I'm listening to an album and I expect a transition into one song, but instead the album skips forward a track or two. I can only assume this is because they've lost distribution rights on a particular song for some infuriating reason.
After the advent of streaming music purchases, and about the time subscription services started, Steve Jobs opined that nobody would want to rent music when you could own it. At that time, I thought that this was old man Jobs stuck in the past. And it sort of was, based on the popularity of Spotify and evidenced by Apple's capitulation. But... I find myself increasingly frustrated by being a serf and being totally at the whims of profit-driven licensing schemes.
And this is why I want something similar to what.cd (I didn't even know about it until it was dead). I'm happy to pay for what I use, but FFS, the idea that we're letting chunks of our culture die because we lack the legal mechanisms to preserve it all makes me just crazy.
That was my first thought too - i bet the music piracy community isn't having a similar problem. And it appears that Bob Seger's back catalogue is pretty well represented:
What.cd was a monumental loss. There was so much rare stuff on there, old albums from local bands where I grew up, that were out of print twenty years ago. Loved it.
I liked the interface and catalog that what.cd had, but I think that private trackers are absolutely the wrong way to go. Having an archive is nice, but there's no present danger of losing most of these albums; the real problem is people not having access to them. We should want rare and out-of-print CDs to be reachable by poor, rural Americans, by Moroccan dentists, and by Chinese schoolchildren. Building a walled fortress that only affluent, tech-aware Westerners can access makes me deeply sad.
There is no incentive for a group to create unique value when the benefit for non-group members is the same as in-group members. Just take a look at how many people contribute to public trackers.
A trusted source and well-known person in the hacker community has said there is a copy of what.cd out there... although it's understandably not accessible to the public.
I very much doubt that claim. There are however other sites that have taken what.cd's place and many of what's users have been hard at work recreating the library.
Wow, that's a realllly long read, I have no idea why I read the entire thing, I'm not much of a Seger fan. The author sure is though, something about the story kept me reading.
I guess the answer, for those who don't want to read, is something like Seger and/or his manager just don't want to. Maybe it's money, or maybe they just don't care.
"Much as Seger's status as a regional star from 1964 through 1976 left him free to record and tour where he felt most comfortable, but those same decisions prevented him from breaking out to the wider national audience he craved, his current level of very substantial success eliminates any pressing need to participate more fully in the digital age."
I'm from that generation and still cringe every time I hear a Bob Seger song, which is far too often still. There is an annoyingly whiny quality that pervades his lyrics and singing style.
On the other hand, I can relate to the sense of loss of music that was seemingly always available at the time but that I never got around to purchasing. There is no current good service or seller that has a suitably complete catalog.
Aside from major artists like Seger, something I have noticed is many indie artists have not made the transition to digital downloads or streaming. I've seen lots of good stuff missing from Spotify, Amazon Music (streaming), and the old Apple Music (digital downloads) including early albums by the Lemonheads (originally released by TAANG records in the 80s), Kula Shaker's Summer Sun EP from 1997, and Christopher Parkening's Parkening Plays Bach LP from 1990.
What many of these recordings have in common is they were originally released on independent labels. I don't know if the labels are no longer in operation, or whether the rights reverted back to the artist or to another entity during a sale or special distribution deal. Whatever the case, important recordings are no longer accessible unless you have the LP, CD, cassette, or DAT (!) from 20 or 25 years ago ... or can find it on YouTube.
I think moving up the format ladder has always been problematic for smaller labels. I remember when Dischord started selling CDs I got the Minor Threat album which didn't have a barcode on the back of the CD case. It also came with a historical booklet so fat it almost didn't fit in the clear plastic case. They were just kind of flying by the seat of their pants.
One of my neighbors happens to be a former member of the Boston indie band O Positive; when I asked him why I couldn't get their songs on iTunes he said the singer (who now happens to be a lawyer) said it was too troublesome to sort out the paperwork and files (this is before Distrokid came on the scene). I just checked Amazon Music and only one of their albums is there, which happens to be their major label release on Epic/Sony. The indie stuff is still MIA.
I grew up listening to Seger's singles in the '80s and never cared too much for his work. I am a massive music fanatic, and read several music-related blogs that turned me on to his pre-Bullet work. Way different than the Night Movies and Only Rock n Roll that I was used to.
Definitely seek out the "Never Mind The Bullets" bootleg mixtape
Wanton downloading was not tolerated; it wasn't a site meant to avoid paying for music; it was a project meant to build an archive -- that there was no payment involved was incidental. You had to contribute to download: either you got buffer via leaving your torrent client on with a fast internet connection, or you got buffer by filling requests (people could pledge some of their buffer to an unfulfilled request to make filling difficult-to-find requests it more attractive). If you wanted to download something and you didn't have enough buffer, you'd either have to wait for your existing stash to generate buffer (via other people requesting it from you) or you'd go in the "requests" tab and buy/lend/obtain and rip the CD in question to fill the request. Between the passionate userbase and this incentive system, over its 9 years, there were a lot of out-of-print albums digitised and distributed for the first time. I spent money on it (for CDs that nobody had uploaded yet) but for the value that it offered me, I'd be willing to pay a lot for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to any copyright/licensing issues.
To see albums fall out of print and become obscure and inaccessible is heart-rending, given that we have the means to archive all of this. It is even more tragic because we won't have forever -- physical media degrades and people die (and their collections get lost or thrown away). To quote Pastor Manul Laphroaig from PoC||GTFO,
> Bitrot will burn libraries with merciless indignity that even Pets Dot Com didn’t deserve. Please mirror—don’t merely link!—pocorgtfo13.pdf and our other issues far and wide, so our articles can help fight the coming flame deluge.
I feel similarly about libraries of music.