The ever growing digitization of information storage is seen as a threat by industry majors, who attempt to protect copyrights from digital piracy through DRM and closed formats. At the moment it all seems inocuous, but twenty years down the road it might prove a serious liability when you will decide to save all your music or films onto a new format on a new kind of storage media.
Today, it would be near impossible to open a 1983 Word document or read an 8-inch floppy disk, and this is what we might be facing in the future when every storage media we use today will have become obsolete like the floppy disk. The UK’s National Archives describes outdated file formats as a “ticking time bomb”.
In a Science Daily article, assistant professor Jerome P. McDonough of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains that to avoid a digital dark age, we need to figure out the best way to keep valuable data alive and accessible by using a multi-prong approach of migrating data to new formats, devising methods of getting old software to work on existing platforms, using open-source file formats and software, and creating data that’s “media-independent.”
“Reliance on open standards is certainly a huge part, but it’s not the only part,” he said. “If we want information to survive, we really need to avoid formats that depend on a particular media type. Commercial DVDs that employ protection schemes make it impossible for libraries to legally transfer the content to new media. When the old media dies, the information dies with it.”
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