Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15

Populism, Digitization and Plenty:An Online Film Archives at 15

Rick PrelingerPrelinger Archives / Internet ArchiveUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

Berlin, November 2015

1Thursday, November 13, 14

Thank you.


It was 1982, and we were in a period of media transition.

Film was giving ground to video, and the world was filled with unwanted film. Producers and distributors were quietly going out of business. I had been a documentary film researcher and realized how much had never been collected by archives.I began to collect ephemeral films -- advertising, educational, industrial and government films, and home movies. Established archives were remarkably passive in this area; in fact, the US is such a media-rich country that no one seemed to care if film was lost.


I organized an unofficial, private archives and funded it by charging for access to our collection as stock footage. This was considerably easier to do in the US than it would have been in Europe, because we have a rich public domain and no serious moral rights laws. Business was good, and many producers were interested in using this material that depicted US life, culture, landscape and industry in such a fascinating way.


In 1999 I moved from New York City to San Francisco, and soon came into contact with Brewster Kahle, philanthropist and founder of Internet Archive. He challenged me to put my archives online for free. As a New Yorker, I'd never heard of the open-source movement, and I thought information wanted to be expensive. So I argued with him.

But it seemed unfair that so many historical resources could only be accessed by a few people. We agreed to move ahead, though I was very conscious this was an experiment. As my income and wellbeing was almost completely derived by selling access to our collection, I had my doubts. But as a contrarian, I had to move ahead.


I proposed to Brewster that we begin with 1001 films. I won't describe my curatorial decisions now, but I could later. Internet Archive subsidized film-to-videotape transfer, hosting and bandwidth. This was my first lesson in one of the quieter truths behind many open-access projects: peel back the layers, and quite often you will find some kind of subsidy. Here is the online archive at 3 months, with 750 films.

After 14 years, our collection has grown to over 6,400 items. More are coming. A study of download figures for our collection alone, plus items mirrored elsewhere, seems to indicate that around 100 million films have been accessed.

In total, Internet Archive offers a total of 1.8 million video items plus clips from 639,000 TV news broadcasts since 2009.


When I visit Europe, the first, second and third questions I get are always about copyright. So let me try to anticipate these so we can move beyond this subject.

U.S. copyright law differs from European in a number of key areas. First, there are many more works that fell into the public domain. I would estimate there are perhaps 400,000 to 500,000 motion pictures that are out of copyright. Second, moral rights plays a much smaller role in American law, so we are not restricted from presenting edited clips or reformatting films. And third, if one of our contributors uploads copyrighted material in error, we have the DMCA.

Culpeper, Virginia7Thursday, November 13, 14

Most of the films I collected are not currently in copyright, so I had few concerns about digitizing them and putting them online.

We HAVE put some orphan works online. Orphan works, for those of you who don't know, are works under copyright whose author is unknown or cannot be located to grant permission for reuse.


Home movies are a special issue -- the quintessential orphaned works.Just about every home movie is an unpublished work and remains under copyright. Who owns rights is often a mystery. I have permission to reuse some, but we have some 13,000 items, and I cannot morally accept the idea of keeping an entire area of culture from public access. So except for some sensitive material, I've started to put our home movie collections online.


What kind of access model did we adopt?

As everyone who shares resources is, we were immediately faced with having to come up with an actionable definition of "openness."

This was my first experience with open digital content, and I have to confess I gravitated toward a restrictive model. You can see it above.

This was inexcusable, but I was also trying to comply with our representation agreement with Getty Images. In a few months, we dropped all of these restrictions.


And in late 2002, we adopted the CC license. This has dropped out of the official history (like David Bollier's book), but we were the first significant cultural collection to adopt the CC license. CC urged us to use a special CC Public Domain declaration that allowed for the fact that we did not own rights to most of the material we licensed, but declared it to be in public domain.

This is what our statement of rights looks like today -- it couldn't be more permissive or welcoming.

Two-tier licensing system

FREE

• downloads

• Creative Commons licenses

• self-indemnification

• user does own research

• automated

• DIY

FEE

• tapes (later files) (high-res)

• specific written agreements

in producer’s name

• reps/warranties/indemnities

• user gets research services

• lots of human intervention

• value added


I think you know this model, which some people call "freemium."


How would this affect our existing stock footage business? We did not know, and it turned out to be a very interesting question. We believe it significantly increased our revenue in a time when license fees were decreasing and the market for historical material was challenged. On top of that, it helped us maintain the Prelinger brand name within the Getty Images portfolio.best estimate: 62% increase


Brewster and I built the first webpage linking to the digitized film files on Saturday, December 28, 2000. Here is my not-so-beautiful interface, which I generated completely in FileMaker. On Tuesday, January 2, 2001, we looked at the directories and found a number of unfamiliar-looking objects. As it turned out, we'd left the write permissions unlocked and some users had contributed several episodes of SOUTH PARK. While we saw this as an altruistic act of sharing, we were also worried that someone might try to close down our emergent service, so I deleted the files and changed the perms. This file "donation" tells me that some of our more sophisticated users construed our collection as a hospitable destination (in the way that South African archivist Verne Harris speaks of Jacques Derrida's sense of hospitality in the archives) and as a node of participation in the YouTube sense.


While this would not last, IA then had user logs.-- government agencies-- universities, especially dormitories-- and a few users at home with broadband. At that time the statistics alleged that 19% of homes had broadband, but I don't think that was really true.

mpeg-2 was 28MB/minute

The site was a great success. it was the first public collection at Internet Archive (before 9/11 TV News archive and Wayback Machine).Students, makers, fans, community producers, activists, artists, scholars, teachers, etc. all picked up on it.


But for archivists, this was a new idea. I think to some it was anathema.Archivists were suspicious about:building a large collection for access onlydigitizing without first preserving the film and presenting video in non-archival formats (too low-res)building an archives site without metadata that conformed to standardspropagating material in what were then high-res formats -- giving too much awayWe were therefore criticized for low-res as well as for high-resSome were peeved that we didn't restrict to streaming but encouraged downloadingSome archivists were concerned with letting material go without restrictions -- that it meant a loss of control. But if you can't release your holdings, then you've REALLY lost control.In any case, we continued, and now it is 14 years later.

Significant issues


Some significant issues I wanted to mention.

Accidental artwork, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 200717Thursday, November 13, 14

How persistent is this collection? Will it last?We are exposing and storing copies for access. These are video or scanned copies of film originals, not original materials themselves.However: just as the films back up the scans, the scans back up the films. it is possible we'll lose films.I do not take persistence for granted, and to me it's axiomatic that we will digitize film more than once in its lifetime (I'm already working on a second go-round for some film).


Metadata, as always, is a problem. I didn't wait for all the metadata to be perfect before putting records up, and I also did not build a mechanism to maintain it. I hoped the community would step in, and for the most part they have not. The annotations/commentary/reviews are of uneven quality. There is some hate speech, and lots of inaccurate info regarding films. To be sure, there is great information as well. Fan culture is wonderful, but it is not infallible. Who will take the time to add, improve and maintain metadata? That's unclear.It is time-consuming. Most of us cannot generate (or research) metadata that is up to scholarly (or even fan) standards.


We have only a single portal. This has a bias towards fan appreciation. While thousands of educators, researchers and scholars use the site, they are almost never present as annotators or reviewers. We could use an education portal, and maybe a scholarly portal into the collection.


Physical preparation of material for digitizing has always been a challenge. For me, it's the #1 roadblock to sharing materials online. It is expensive and requires trained people. I tried to crack this nut by convening a group of emerging and would-be archivists who volunteered in exchange for training, and it sort of worked, but it would be really difficult to do it at scale.


Putting digital collections online for public access is inherently a retail business, and one needs to be prepared to offer some kind of support. Almost fifteen years later, I still get emails asking me how to download. There are still many people who (1) don't realize that downloading might meet their needs better than playing through a browser or (2) don't know how to right-click or control-click.

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/shrinking


How do we want to think about copyright as laws evolve?

ECL is a real problem. The regularization of orphan works concerns me as well. Melissa Terras is doing a great series of blogposts about the new UK regime. Who will these collective licensing organizations be, how much will they cost to administer, and who will get the money? And why should individuals go through the same process that a major publisher or studio must go through? Could we have built this site under ECL or a regularized orphan works regime?

And as cultural custodians, we're obliged to take the long view, which means we cannot postpone thinking about issues that last longer than copyright and pose more profound questions. For instance, how can we temper openness with respect? Questions of indigenous or community cultural and intellectual property rights, and the moral rights of creators, all pose issues that go far beyond the bounds of copyright. These issues will outlive shorter-term discussions and are part of shaping the kind of world we hope to live in.



Measures of success


Was this project successful? Well, we don't have objective metrics or scientific criteria to judge. I've proposed in the past that we borrow a page from the environmental sector and require impact statements for digitization projects. We might ask: How might a project affect the condition, preservation status and longevity of the original materials? What kind of impact would access to these materials have on the cultural and social spheres? But we don't yet do impact statements.Instead I need to talk about outcomes and apply flexible criteria; ultimately you will be the judges.

The accessible archives:

Treats access as a key part of its mission, not an afterthoughtReconfigures its workflows to expand access and useLimits access to collections only as required by law, respect, custom

and unavoidable constraintMakes materials available before they're requestedMeasures value by consumptive useSeeks out new usersBrings archives into the community and community into the archivesSees archival activity as a civic functionBuilds transactional spacesAvoids being hobbled by the precautionary principle

24Thursday, November 13, 14I don't want to repeat the arguments for making archives more accessible; I would hope we're beyond needing to be convinced. But here are some of what I think the attributes of an accessible archives might be. Our online experience led us in these directions.


Specific to our project, I CAN say a few things.

We made original historical films available to a very broad public, who used them in traditional and quite unorthodox ways. This had never before happened.We caused some 100 million films to be downloaded or viewed. This is striking given the obscurity and specialized character of many of the works.We played a role in lowering use fees for public domain material. This might be a double-edged sword.


We influenced countless scholars who otherwise might never have considered incorporating moving images into their research. The films have propagated into hundreds of papers, dissertations, and books.We also strongly influenced the development of a fan culture focused on industrial and educational film-- mention MST3KWe played a key role in helping move ordinary film, useful film, quotidian film from the cultural periphery towards the center.

entitlementbroadening documentary aesthetics

youth and newer Americanscentrality of archives

de-marginalize archivists


Less tangibly --We increased the sense of entitlement with which people regard the Internet and moving image archives generally. We replaced a model of scarcity with a model of plenty, as Lawrence Lessig used to put it in the early 2000s. We gave people a sense of how a gift economy might work.We helped to expand makers' sense of how archival materials could be used, beyond the overdetermined and historicized ways they are used in documentariesWe collected a decently large chunk of U.S. cultural and social history and made it available for commentary and remixing by younger people and newer AmericansAlong with the other Internet Archive access projects, I think we helped push forward a new sense of the centrality of archives in the world. To engage in archival activity is to intervene in history's flow. I think many more people understand the importance of archival work.We helped to move the figure of the archivist from the margins towards the cultural center. We helped to make archivists and archival practice cool.


And we had a band named after us.


As to the future:

We felt a little lonely when this project started, and I have to say we still feel a little lonely. While many cultural digitization projects that offer one or another flavor of open access now exist, most moving image collections are not online. There is a kind of exceptionalism that seems to apply to films. Or if they are online, they're not available for most kinds of use. Viewing-only access is NOT open access. We need to be thinking of moving images and sound as we think of code -- as objects that users are able to freely access, download, modify and manipulate. This is especially true when we realize that many of the "audience" members for moving images in the future will be machines, not people.

"The objective of archival policy in a democratic country cannot be the mere

saving of paper; it must be nothing less than the enriching of the complete historical

consciousness of the people as a whole..."

Robert C. Binkley, 1939


I realize that we won't be able to offer free access to all cultural resources. And yet, as we enumerate the reasons for cultural enclosure and make our excuses as to why certain materials are not publicly available, we have the responsibility to specify (as clearly as we can) why we can't release, how and when they will be released and by whom. If we can't offer openness, we must at least plan for it.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/archiving-is-the-new-folk-art/


Projects like ours have helped to mainstream archival activity. Because today the spread of digital culture has rendered archival activity universal. To quote archivist/provocateur/poet Kenneth Goldsmith: "The advent of digital culture has turned each one of us into an unwitting archivist....The ways in which culture is distributed and archived has become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption..."




We may not survive projects such as YouTube. Now, I am a tremendous fan of YouTube. It is hugely paradoxical. It is an amazing repository that offers a hit for almost every query, that permits anyone to upload their work and let it intermingle with the work of their cultural heroes. It's become a magnet for personal media, filling the persistent gap between the world of massive personal media production and the archival ecosystem that hasn't collected it. No established archives will ever serve as many videos to as many people. It appropriates the eyes and ears of the public by offering easy access to subsets of cultural expression unavailable elsewhere without great effort. It enables countless instances of media and multimedia authorship & remix that legacy archives never wanted to enable and could never have enabled on their own. But we might describe its relationship with its users as a noncommittal handshake. Archival persistence, digital longevity and resistance from outside interference are traded in for the appearance of openness, an absence of latency, and an omnivirous collecting policy curated, if curated at all, by machines that know not to expose certain videos to Chinese IP addresses. Just as we are willingly exchanging the resiliency of venerable copper-wired telephone networks for the stimulation of app-driven but unreliable wireless smartphones, we have exchanged the traditional archives for the apparent archives, gaining an appearance of completeness that is in fact full of gaps. And I doubt established institutions will ever be able to catch up with them or with the other massive commercial collections that will follow.

Detroit, February 201133Thursday, November 13, 14

I end with a thought about Europe and America. We do a few things differently. Our project was not the work of a government agency; it was supported by Brewster Kahle, a philanthropist who wanted to help bring moving images to the Web six years before the launch of YouTube. While Americans aren't very good at doing the great, national-level digitization projects you do in Europe with the help of cultural ministries, we are great at bottom-up, entrepreneurial initiatives. You work out the issues with stakeholders and standards; we are ready-fire-aim. We are more disposed to question copyright maximalism; in Europe it often seems to be beyond question. I have no opinion as to which is better, but I strongly believe this is the time for each of us to learn from one another.

@[email protected]

34Thursday, November 13, 14Thank you.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

This talk is online athttp://www.slideshare.net/footage/populism-

digitization-and-plenty-an-online-film-archives-at-15


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Populism, Digitization and Plenty: An Online Film Archives at 15