preservation

Gugusse et l’Automate: Rediscovery of the first robot film

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged movies preservation silent movies on by

If you’ve seen the movie Hugo (and you should), you remember the wonderful scene where a humanoid automaton is restored and goes into action, revealing an important secret. Georges Méliès found these machines fascinating. His 1897 Gugusse et l’Automate presents an automaton (played by an actor) in what has been called the world’s first film about a robot. Bill McFarland brought a box of old films from Grand Rapids, Michigan to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Virginia, and one of them was a third-generation copy of Gugusse. Film historians had known it existed, but no one now living had seen it. The preservation experts digitized the one-minute film, which I’m sure must have been fragile, and it’s now available freely on YouTube and other sites.

Hachette v. Internet Archive

This entry was posted in Commentary Publishing and tagged books copyright law libraries preservation on by

The legal battle over the Internet Archive’s Open Library has drawn passionate responses from people involved in the creation, publication, and distribution of books. As I’m writing this, the court of the Southern District of New York has ruled that putting unauthorized digitized versions of copyrighted books on the open Internet is a violation of copyright, and the Internet Archive is appealing the decision.

Publishers Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins argued that distributing books through the Open Library violated their copyrights. The Internet Archive has declared its appeal is “a necessary fight if we want library collections to survive in the digital age.” SFWA has stated that the Open Library “is not library lending, but direct infringement of authors’ copyrights.” The debate pits the rights of authors and publishers against the aims of preservation.
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