European archives release vintage films online

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More competition is good, especially if it's free!: This type of offering is great for a number of reasons: it brings art that was essentially lost back into the mainstream, and it presents a wider range of content to the public that will compete with the crap currently being excreted out of Hollywood.

The media cartels have many fears, but this is one; that more and more public-domain content will become available to ... the public. As long as it was locked up in archives and required esoteric equipment to access, it was tolerable, but now those barriers are coming down. Europe's copyright laws are not as egregious as those in the US, so many more works are becoming available in the public domain every year.

In the meantime, watch the cartels try to denigrate and block the new project with many tactics. The governmental archives will probably not suffer, but the cartels will make their displeasure known to the private archives, and any archivists who cooperate in this venture. The cartels will also encourage the project to "price themselves out of the market" by charging fees for what is actually free material. I could see a fee for making and shipping DVDs of the material, because there are new costs associated with ease use of the material. But for online access, this would be a PERFECT opportunity for P2P networking to shine. Instead of paying bandwidth for a streaming site, the site should be set up as a Torrent portal that could seed the content and allow others to access it via P2P, keeping bandwidth costs distributed amongst the consumers. Sadly, P2P has such notoriety that it will be shouted down without fail, and we will still be locked into a streaming environment that needlessly and expensively limits access.; Posted by: terry flores Posted on: 02/12/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use