Maybe that's theoretically true - but so far, copyright wars aside, it's been moving in the other direction, as storage and bandwidth get ever cheaper. One person finds a Super-8 film when they renovate the attic, it gets transferred, they upload it to YouTube, and now it's permanently on the Internet.
You can now listen to the earliest recorded audio[1] (which was never heard or playable in its own time), read many of Isaac Newton's original manuscripts[2] (with plans to triple the archive this year), and google ["yeeees" guy] to watch a clip of Frank Nelson[3].
You don't have to excavate at all; you just have to make it searchable so that someday, someone will run across it. This is what we have with just text search. Now add in PhotoSynth (the original, Flickr-driven version[4] with every photo ever, not the watered-down panorama app), automatic audio transcription, content-aware image search, "hum that tune" (Shazam, SoundHound, etc.). Within a decade, we'll have "imagine that video and search for it".
"Movage" becomes less of a problem because while it's not worth it for you to individually convert various old files on your hard drive, Google has no problem re-encoding their entire library to add HTML5 codecs: Write the script once and wait a few years for it to finish. It's already in some master, readable format, so they don't have the "ten versions of Word .DOCs" problem (or if they do, they hide it very well).
If anything, we're entering an age where nothing goes out of print, and there are no lost films. Ever. Yes, we have to fight some copyright battles, but the outcome is inevitable; in 50 years, all laws will be written by people who grew up with BitTorrent, not the DuMont network.
Someone coined a great term for this new age of digital plenty, but I forgot it. In ten years, I'll be able to Google that thought and tell you what it was.
You can now listen to the earliest recorded audio[1] (which was never heard or playable in its own time), read many of Isaac Newton's original manuscripts[2] (with plans to triple the archive this year), and google ["yeeees" guy] to watch a clip of Frank Nelson[3].
You don't have to excavate at all; you just have to make it searchable so that someday, someone will run across it. This is what we have with just text search. Now add in PhotoSynth (the original, Flickr-driven version[4] with every photo ever, not the watered-down panorama app), automatic audio transcription, content-aware image search, "hum that tune" (Shazam, SoundHound, etc.). Within a decade, we'll have "imagine that video and search for it".
"Movage" becomes less of a problem because while it's not worth it for you to individually convert various old files on your hard drive, Google has no problem re-encoding their entire library to add HTML5 codecs: Write the script once and wait a few years for it to finish. It's already in some master, readable format, so they don't have the "ten versions of Word .DOCs" problem (or if they do, they hide it very well).
If anything, we're entering an age where nothing goes out of print, and there are no lost films. Ever. Yes, we have to fight some copyright battles, but the outcome is inevitable; in 50 years, all laws will be written by people who grew up with BitTorrent, not the DuMont network.
Someone coined a great term for this new age of digital plenty, but I forgot it. In ten years, I'll be able to Google that thought and tell you what it was.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/372994/earliest-audio-recording-resurrect...
[2] http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA_r1Ynl4Ls
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0