>There could be a seeding of time release devices set to
differing dates. 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years, etc.
This could help to deal with the problem of potential dark
ages. (They may not censor what they can't read).<
Maybe I'm just a bit more paranoid than you, but something
tells me that a locked box of potential enlightenment won't
be kept unharmed by repressive institutions. The Clock
Project seems to aspire toward visibility, and its time
release secrets might very well be the target for destructive
acts in destructive historical epochs simply because the documents
are known archives of unknown content.
That caveat aside, a mechanism in a sealed document
that opened it after its copyright expired seems like an
interesting encryption challenge, just as the problem of
knowing what time it really is has challenged the keepers
of The Clock.
I hope that it is understood, that an underlying strategy
advocated by this voice is to make lots and lots of copies.
Yes, I am trying to cope with the justified concerns of the
creative half of our community that original work is all
too readily pirated in the digital domain, but at the
same time address the conservator community that
recognizes that without some duplication process a key
power of digital media is rendered moot.
Moreover, I am arguing that physical copies have a variety
of intrinsic merits in the same time frame as copyright
protection itself (some 50 to 100 years). My argument is that
the volume of data involved with all contemporary copyrighted
works cannot possibly be transmitted on-demand to consumers.
Better to make discs, tapes, holographic cubes, or whatever,
available through conventional avenues of commerce and then
unlock their contents at the consumersâ end through means of
telecommunication by the provision of a key.
Lots and lots of copies have been one secret to longevity of
our existing historical record. The attrition visited upon one
library may be spared upon another come Dark Age or
natural disaster.