"It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago," the survey notes. "What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies."
But even those older artifacts face the prospect of being lost to posterity because of our nation's copyright laws. So concludes The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age (PDF).
"Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken," the report warns. "Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal."
Back to the future
The main problem is that for decades the intellectual property rights of most sound recordings were covered not by federal law, but by a complicated matrix of state statutes and judicial precedents. When Congress finally did extend federal authority over these works via its late twentieth century Copyright Acts, it put the annulment date for the earlier rules at 2067.
"Thus, a published US sound recording created in 1890 will not enter the public domain until 177 years after its creation," the study observes, "constituting a term of rights protection 82 years longer than that of all other forms of audiovisual works made for hire."
This, of course, creates huge challenges for audio librarians and archivists, which the report outlines in painful detail.
Great expectations
Prior to the digital revolution, the public assumed that the only way to sample a library's audio fare was to actually visit the institution and listen to recordings via record players, cassette machines, and headphones. Today, however, citizens expect to sample audio via some kind of Web site.
It is "virtually impossible," the report insists, "to attract grants and donors to support preservation of collections that will not be accessible once preservation occurs."
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