As a person who loves history and culture, it pains me to read articles like this of culture disappearing.

This is what happens when organisations lock up content and then don’t store it properly. Remember the warehouse fire in the U.S, which destroyed a lot of masters from the catalogue of movies and music that Universal held. And for some insane reason the back-ups to those masters were held in the same vault.

Madness.

And negligence.

All because the organisation failed to spend some of the billions they earn from these copyrights to properly store the masters in one location and their back-ups in a different location.

And in proper temperatures.

In the article, the tapes of the films are developing a “vinegar syndrome”, which happens because acetate films are stored in a warm, humid room.

It’s pretty obvious these organisations don’t know how to store cultural history. And they have no interest to preserve or to spend the money to digitize it. So why can’t they release the tapes to organisations like the Internet Archive or even the Public Domain to digitize the films for preservation.

Because they are scared that others will do something great and make money from content they produced once upon a time.