The Story of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV News | Hacker News Reader

The Story of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV News

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104 pointsJoshGlazebrook15 comments

I want to hear more about Stokes' story. She was a librarian but had the money to own multiple apartments, buy 140k VHS tapes, and "192 Macintosh computers." She sounds fascinating.

There is a little more about her in her obituary. http://articles.philly.com/2012-12-21/news/35955478_1_televi...

And a half-century of newspapers.

"She was married three times and was twice divorced."

35 years ago Marion Stokes probably could have never imagined that her collection would one day be instantly searchable and viewable by anyone with a computer.

I imagine when she told her friends what she was doing it would be akin to someone today saying they are trying to record everything on the internet. Back then probably pretty crazy. Now? Maybe still crazy!

Tell that to the folks at the Library of Congress! http://www.businessinsider.com/library-of-congress-is-archiv...

In theory this stuff is archived 'somewhere' but the realities of archived video is such that often it is just not accessible. The library of congress is supposed to have a copy of 'every' movie, and everything that is copyrighted, but due to various cut-outs that just is not so.

"supposed to have a copy ... everything that is copyrighted"

Many things have a copyright restriction on reproduction. These happen automatically upon creation. The LoC does not get a copy of these. (For example, it doesn't get a copy of internal proprietary company documentation, even though those are covered under copyright.)

There are additional legal advantages to registering a copyright. These are part of the public record, and the LoC may have up to two copies of these registered documents.

However, it can decide to not keep any copies. Quoting from http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9709/acquire.html:

The Library usually rejects individual company sales manuals, advertisements, coloring books, elementary and high school textbooks (except in U.S. history), instructors' manuals, student workbooks and self-published books except for genealogies, local histories and other publications of special interest. ... The Library collects materials in all subjects, except technical agriculture and clinical medicine, which are kept by the National Agricultural Library and the National Library of Medicine.

So, your text is more correctly written as "The Library of Congress may have up to two copies of every movie or other thing with a registered copyright, but due to various cut-outs that just is not so."

Thus, there's no reason to assume this stuff is archived anywhere.

Is that internal proprietary company documentation considered just a trade secret or a trade secret and also protected by copyright?

Copyright protection is automatic on any creative work. This is required of all countries which are signatory to the Berne Convention, including the US.

If the documentation is non-creative then that would not be covered under copyright but could still be a trade secret.

That doesn't make sense because as soon as you create something you automatically own the copyright to it.

I had inadvertently taped some old local news broadcasts in the 80's, and rewatching them is kinda fun.

Kudos to Marion for doing this, I think this archive will be regarded as invaluable years from now.

I always thought recording all TV and indexing the captions would be a cool project. The Google Books case may set a precedent to legalize such a project.

Im fairly sure this is how Google Video started out, but wikipedia has more about its later YouTube-like existence.

That is part of the internet archive's mission. There may be a newer and maybe transcripted version of this talk, but it's a wonderful talk by Brewster Kahle estimating the amount of space needed to store all of humanity's collected output (including all broadcast TV): http://web.archive.org/web/20130729231218id_/http://itc.conv...

(Cooincidentally it looks like archive.org has taken over hosting the now-defunct itconversations podcasts.)

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