Brewster Kahle, web archivist, asserts that the history of world cinema has produced no more than a hundred thousand feature films ? even at 5 gigabytes per movie that?s a relatively trivial 500 terabytes of digital storage ? a big investment for a single organisation but a drop in the ocean of networked storage. He also says (can this be true?) that no more than one million albums-worth of music have been recorded in history, an even more trivial storage task at about 50 megabytes per album (5 terabytes ? less than 200 modern PCs). Visualise the totality of world cinema and recorded music slipping into the net’s ocean of connected drives without a ripple. How could the legal owners of this stuff perceive file sharing as anything other than an apocalypse for their business? The net community?s indignation and impatience with the media industries must be tempered by some empathy! This must be a terrifying time…
(incidentally, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive is so noble a pursuit, on such a grand scale that it takes your breath away)