This required some digging, but remember the BBC reporting that UK libraries
compalin about DRM (encrypion) and its long-term effects on data
preservation? Here's an interesting view.
Publish And Perish
,----[ Quote ]
| Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now
| Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information.
| "If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs
| look the same?" he asks. "The Mac or the PC--will they be around?
| If they are, what about the software? " So far there's no business
| case for digital preservation--in fact, for software makers like
| Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.
|
| "The reality is that it's in companies' interest that software should
| become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,"
| Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the
| way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation.
| "Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal
| photos," Rose said.
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http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/books-information-preservation-tech-media_cx_ee_books06_1201acid.html?partner=yahootix
http://tinyurl.com/yyjqoh
It's about the tradition of breaking and invalidating old technology in order
to encourage unnecessary purchases (waste). It's also about competing
formats (including competing DRM that's embodied in binary blobs that are
the keys to decryption). What it boils down to is refusal to give companies
control over data (its storage and access privileges in particular).
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