At least 99% of art is doomed to obscurity. We cannot count on corporations to deliver this content to us.

There's no hope of streaming services matching the breadth of art: it's a 40,000 year-old tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_the_Upper_Paleolithic

It is hard enough to license art for physical release. Streaming licenses require keeping rightsholders perpetually happy.

What can you do? Pirate stuff, help others pirate stuff, and advocate for shorter copyright.

Use libraries, advocate for libraries (they don't just have books), and take advantage of their unique privilege under US copyright law.

Support groups with a modern approach to intellectual "property", such as Archive.org, AO3, and ArchiveTeam.

We live in a world where basically no art should be lost. Especially not "good" art, as hard/impossible as that is to define.

Yet if you look around, that's not what has happened. Works get released then forgotten. And...

Copyright and trademark law attacks fan works inspired by cultural traditions.

Metadata is already being lost, if not entire works. You can find fan sites that link back to original sources that no longer exist.

On sites like DeviantArt, artists post pictures along with comments. If you're lucky, the picture has been backed up elsewhere.

But it's unlikely that comments from fans or the artist were saved alongside it.

Okay, that's DeviantArt. "Who cares about DeviantArt?"
1. DeviantArt hosts conventionally "good" art.

2. Even "bad" art is important, and I believe we have the storage capacity to save it all.

Specifically, with storage capacity growing constantly, I think humans can save 100% of art intentionally posted for others to experience.

Pictures, music, and text for sure. Maybe even videos, although it's accepted folklore that YouTube operates at a loss. https://medium.com/@intenex/where-are-you-getting-hard-data-that-youtube-isnt-profitable-a00aed0672ac

That brings me back to my point that corporations can't be trusted to save our art. We need to think bigger.

Steam users are surely more tech-savvy than most. And 80% of Steam users have at least 100 GB of free space.

There are the seeds for a distributed file (art) store, and projects ranging from cool to scams trying to pull it off.

Hydrus is cool as fuck (haven't used it though): https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/

There are blockchain scams like Filecoin, Sia, Storj.

Those are scams because like many *coins, their goal is a fixed number of tokens in the wild. Economically, that is absurd.

I'm going a lot of places, but let's bring it back to commercial art. EVEN COMMERCIAL ART IS ALWAYS ON THE BRINK OF DEATH.

There was a section here about popular art. Tldr: Mickey Mouse is fine. Don't worry about Mickey Mouse.

There is, however, a ton of commercial art that did not find an audience. I argue this is over 90% of commercially-released art.

This might only exist on a VHS, or a floppy disk, or even a fucking LaserDisc!

Vinyl is probably going to outlast all humans. (Still gotta worry about storing it...) CDs and other mediums are quickly dying!

LaserDiscs and some CDs are near-death, right now. The time has come. Hard drives in storage may die too. https://superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data

There's a show called Legend of the Galactic Heroes. A classic. #6 top-rated anime by fans. So you can go and watch it now, right?

Not exactly. You can watch the remake -- it's had something like a George Lucas retouch to its 1980s imperfections.

But the imperfections are the point!

You can't see how LotGH influenced later anime when you watch the remake. It was influenced by the shows that LotGH influenced.

You would think the $800 Blu-Ray box set would included the original cut as a bonus or something. Blu-Ray discs cost pennies to make.

But that expensive boxset just has the remake. It's starting to look like we can't count on commercial releases to preserve art.

Does the production company still have the original scenes? Nobody knows! If not, the only copies are LaserDiscs. Those don't last forever.

The LaserDiscs basically don't show up on online shopping sites. I couldn't find them in Japan, even in places with lots of LD anime.

Yet another sidebar: the collector mindset. Collectors, at this point, believe they are keeping their art for themselves.

It's shitty and selfish, and for deteriorating art, it's not even true. They don't have a Library of Alexandria; their Library is burning.

There is a fascinating tool that archives LaserDiscs. Archival-grade storage is around 100-1000 GB per disc. https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=376106&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

For comparison, a 4K Blu-Ray is 100 GB. Archiving LaserDiscs isn't easy alone. But imagine if 10,000 fans split the burden.

It would be like 15 GB per fan - something almost anyone could spare. The show has 150,000 raters on a popular anime site. https://myanimelist.net/anime/820/Ginga_Eiyuu_Densetsu

No one collector, despite assumptions of omnipotence, can save it all. We have to work together.

When you come across art not likely to be saved, the stuff nobody remembers, that's your cue to save it for future generations.

You remember, and you're important. Pay for proper archival efforts, and when it's not for money, help out the nonprofit efforts.

If you can't think of a single work of art that you love but (almost) nobody is aware of, you aren't trying hard enough.

Plunge the depths of scholarship and history for whatever medium you care about. Music, film, paintings, whatever. There's always something.

There's no point saving art if nobody experiences it.

What else can you do? Proactively save cool Internet stuff you find. For videos, download it with YouTube-dl (not just for YouTube).

Nothing disappears off the web faster than a YouTube video using copyrighted music in an interesting way.

Use this bookmarklet to save web pages to Archive.org. Bookmark the archived link it makes.

javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href.replace(/res:[^#]*#/,'');void(null)

Consider posting the art you make with a permissive license. Creative Commons has many licenses to choose from. https://creativecommons.org/

Be aware of copyright law and digitize public domain art. Lesser-known works may not have good-quality copies posted online.

For example, you can take a picture of something at an art museum for others to use.

Push the boundaries of fair use. It's hard to imagine the public domain growing without people realizing how bad copyright is.

Music sampling is widely believed to be legally dicey - yet Drake won a case on fair-use grounds.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/drake-beats-lawsuit-sampling-winning-fair-use-argument-1008935

In my non-lawyerly opinion, groups like AO3 aren't skirting the law; they're narrowing it. You do your part every time you make a meme!

Check the random shit your family has accumulated. For example, there are archivists strongly interested in Apple II floppy disks. https://paleotronic.com/2018/06/15/the-internet-archives-jason-scott-talks-apple-ii-software-preservation/

If you grew up on the Internet, you know the importance of all this. My world would be so narrow under a strict interpretation of copyright.

YouTube wouldn't exist under a strict copyright regime. I've discovered so many music, movies, and games without using traditional means.

There's more to art than the 10 companies hoarding all of it. They want to decide what you experience and when.

Fuck that. We can do better. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 @Seglegs. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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