CNet. Western Digital's new hard-drive arrives at 200 Gigabytes. This is great:

Drive makers will surely need the new interface, as developments push areal densities to 100GB per platter. Such density could allow desktop drives to reach 400GB of storage by the end of next year.

It's too bad that overly-generous copyright laws prevent this capacity from being used. If copyright were at the Lessig threshold of five years, all manner of scenarios would be possible: a personal copy of the Library of Congress; archives of major newspapers, magazines, etc.; societal memory at your fingertips. Amazing. What value is that to our civilization?

To not fill this capacity (and unleash the creativity it could spawn) would be tantamount to the burning of the classical antiquity's Library of Alexandria. In a quest for power and control, a tyrant accidently destroyed one of the founts of knowledge in the ancient world.

Aren't we experiencing a similar power grab by corporate copyright holders for the same motives?

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]