Librarians call it “the 20th century black hole.” You can log on to the Internet and find creative works spanning almost the whole of human history. According to the internet, though, people by and large stopped creating things in the early 1900s, and only started back up again around the year 2000. What happened? Copyright—or, more clearly, our modern version of copyright, an exaggerated, metastasized version that’s now doing a great deal of harm to history.

So true. There are books and games and other software that I used during the mid-80s and very early 90s that I can find no record of any kind on the internet. For books, perhaps if I had the ISBN I could re-discover it. However, all I recall is the title of a book that might have been sold only in a region of the country, or a bit of software that might have sold 5,000 copies and been distributed mostly on BBSes. These items are forever lost to history thanks to obscurity combined with copyright laws.

All times lose most of their history. Thanks to copyright, DRM, and the evanescent nature of digital media, we are likely to lose nearly all of ours.