From Andrew Daviel
An inexpensive, if somewhat unpredictable, way to preserve sound archives (1 March, p 40) or any other media, would be to “copyleft” them (2 February 2002, p 34) and release them on the Web. Applying Moore’s law – that transistor density on chips is increasing exponentially – to digital storage media means it is more expensive to intelligently purge information than to preserve it – my new hard drive contains a copy of my old one, which contains a copy of the previous one – so that material may survive indefinitely into the future. Copy-protected material, on the other hand, may disappear in only a few years, rendered unplayable by changes in technology.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
