An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker

I’m concerned things like this will just be gone forever in the digital era. Paper and film are great storage mediums. I know this was on a screen but would it have still existed if it wasn’t on paper first?

Hard disks are great storage mediums when we don't purposely set fire to them to preserve the profits of large corporations. The Internet Archive is perfectly capable of preserving things, unless copyright holders manage to shut them down for short-term profit.

Agreed, and I think it's important to note that paper doesn't have any sort of DRM encumbrance on it. I seriously think that at some point in the next few decades, the "pirates" who right now are hated and prosecuted vigorously by all the "rightsholders" may turn out to be venerable heroes for having preserved the creations.

Imagine if we had found Bram Stokers work, and it was also encrypted mumbo jumbo that is now useless to us. We'll likely never know what we lost.

IA shouldn't try to wage war against copyright. They should leave that to other entities.

IA should be an archivist organization first and foremost and abandon the idea of making books, movies, and music publicly available. That's just painting a target on their back and risking their goal of preserving a snapshot of our time.

The wayback machine is great, though, and they should keep doing that.

What are you referring to here? Hopefully not the secure destruction of hard disks.

The law's preference for 120 years of copyright instead of the preservation of culture. IA should be state-funded.

How does copyright relate to burning hard drives?