Deteriorating piano rolls can’t be preserved due to copyright law – an irony because the 1909 copyright act was passed precisely to keep piano rolls from driving live music from the market.
If you go to link, prepare to click through to an interesting history of pressure group politics, luddite-style regulation, and state planning at the behest of private industry – all the interest of stopping progress and sustaining monopolies.
Ah the glories of copyright!
P.S. Manuel Lora gave me this idea for this post. I stole it from him. Oddly and inexplicably, he blogged the item too, strongly suggesting that ideas are infinitely reproduceable and, actually, therefore, unlootable in the traditional sense.
