At the NY Times, David Streitfeld complains that the digital world, which should open up more information to everyone, is in some ways actually restricting it. If you own a physical copy of a book or cd, you can do whatever you want with it: sell it, lend it, give it away. But publishers are doing all they can to keep you from doing any of those things with a digital resource like an ebook or digital audio file. Not only that, but digital services can and sometimes do simply erase things from their servers, yanking them out of the world; if we were talking about physical objects, copies of them would exist somewhere, like in libraries, but digital resources can much more easily disappear.
Some attempts to digitally archive disappearing physical resources have been attacked. For example the digital archive of music from 78 rpm records, some of them more than a century old, has been threatened with closure by the music publishers' association.
Part of this has to do with our horrible copyright laws. It's simply ridiculous that a recording issued on a 78 rpm disk in 1948 and out of print since 1949 is still protected by copyright. Another factor is that it costs money for digital providers to keep digital material available for sale or rental, so they have a habit of regularly pruning their lists:
When Netflix shipped DVDs to customers, there were about 100,000 to choose from. Streaming, which has a different economics, has reduced that to about 6,600 U.S. titles. Most are contemporary. Only a handful of movies on Netflix were made between 1940 and 1970.
The internet has made some kind of information much more readily available, but it has not led to the paradise of free information for everyone that we imagined back in the 90s.
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