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from the what-is-the-read/write-speed? dept.
Why Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc
Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to store a copy of the 1978 movie "Superman" on a small glass disc about the size of a coaster. The collaboration, which will be officially unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood's movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come.
"Glass has a very, very long lifetime," said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. "Thousands of years."
[Image] The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 "Superman" movie, measuring 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes.
Microsoft began to investigate glass as a storage medium in 2016 in partnership with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre. The goal of these efforts, dubbed "Project Silica," is to find a new storage medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data — the type of data you likely won't need to access for months, years, or even decades. It's data that doesn't need to sit on a server, ready to be used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could corrupt it.
This is not the Superman memory crystal we need.
Also at The Verge.
Related: "5D" Laser-Based Polarization Vortex Storage Could Hold Hundreds of Terabytes for Billions of Years
(Score: 4, Touché) by rufty on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:20PM (3 children)
But will this last long enough for the copyright to expire?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday November 06 2019, @08:48PM (2 children)
Not after the Mouse gets wind of it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday November 06 2019, @11:46PM (1 child)
Perhaps a sad, but true statement. I still hold out a bit of hope. Then again, I'd rather certain works be allowed exemption / lengthy extension, if as in the case of Mickey Mouse, it's an iconic representation of actively used assets.
Here's a table that helps you see how convoluted our copyright system is: https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain [cornell.edu] And that was the easy to read version.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Friday November 08 2019, @04:13AM
What you're looking for is trademarks, which can last forever so long as the trademark is being actively used. If Steamboat Willie was public domain, you couldn't just go and make new Mickey Mouse cartoons without permission, as you'd run into trademark issues. You would, however, be able to freely copy, watch, and distribute copies of Steamboat Willie.