World spec'mode

The Eternal Archive

It is the year 2049, and while numerous “knowledge ark” initiatives have begun to emerge across the globe, many of them are grappling with the issue of copyright: how can we bring together all of humanity’s intellectual heritage in one place if a large portion of it cannot be duplicated without restrictions (requiring authorization, payment, non-distribution, digitization under certain conditions, etc.)? While public initiatives do exist and seek to circumvent the problem by emphasizing their mission of long-term preservation and their somewhat unique status as heritage institutions, private initiatives are rarer, as they require investing substantial sums of money to purchase the rights to several thousand—or even millions—of works. That said, multinational corporations capable of handling colossal sums of money do exist and are even becoming more numerous worldwide. At the helm of one such company, a multibillionaire—perceived by many as eccentric—has set his sights on building a private multimedia library containing several hundred thousand different items. Books, films, artifacts, biological samples, music—everything is included, sometimes in digitized form, sometimes not. This beautiful collection eventually came into being in the Azores archipelago, right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Technically, it is not a cultural heritage institution, and it is not open to the general public; but in practice, it is essentially the same, since the collection contains more items than many small museums or public libraries around the world. In addition, this private library is complemented by a second library, which is designed to gather as many copyright-free items as possible, with its content available online for free. Together, these two collections have been aptly named “The Eternal Archive” by their owner, who hopes eventually to build his own universal library, although this goal remains, at this stage, very distant and uncertain. Nevertheless, even if it is not universal, this “eternal” archive is one of the largest time capsules in existence on the planet, both in terms of the capsule’s volume and the size of its contents.