Future Knowledge

In this conversation, Michael Menna and Anjali Vats unpack how copyright law really works for musicians outside the mainstream. While stars like Taylor Swift make headlines for reclaiming their masters, countless “fringe musicians” navigate a system that often privileges profit over creativity. Together, Menna and Vats examine the gap between copyright’s ideals and its realities—exploring how power, access, and inequity shape who benefits from the music economy and what a fairer future might look like.

Read Michael Menna's paper, "The Fringe Musician, the 360 Deal, and a New Look at Copyright and Competition in Music": https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/jipl/vol32/iss1/3/

Read Anjali Vats' paper, "Owning Your Masters (Taylor’s Version): Postfeminist Tactical Copyright and the Erasure of Black Intellectual Labor": http://www.anjalivats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Vats_Ch-48_Owning-Your-Masters_Scans_pp552-573.pdf

This conversation was recorded on 09/11/2025.

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, chat with Lauren Goode of Wired about the rise of the web, its continuing and explosive impact on society, and the importance of preserving the web for our cultural history.

This conversation was hosted at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on 10/9/2025.

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge 

In 1996, the web was still young—a chaotic, creative frontier built one page at a time. That same year, the Internet Archive set out to preserve it all. Nearly three decades later, that audacious goal has reached a generational milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved.

Co-hosts Chris Freeland (Internet Archive) and Dave Hansen (Authors Alliance) talk with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, about how this vast public archive came to be—and what 1 trillion captures mean for humanity’s collective memory.

This conversation was recorded on 10/16/2025.

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

Author Trevor Owens joins media scholar Shannon Mattern to discuss his book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. Together, they explore how libraries, archives, and museums can reclaim their role in shaping a just and sustainable digital present. Owens argues that cultural memory institutions—long “disrupted” by tech-sector ideologies—must chart their own course forward by centering values of maintenance, care, and repair, ensuring that the future of memory is built on belonging and connection rather than burnout and loss.

Grab your copy of After Disruption: https://press.umich.edu/Books/A/After-Disruption3

This conversation was recorded on 9/25/2025. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/after-disruption

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

How does copyright shape the music we love—and influence how it's made, distributed, and reimagined? In this episode, Jennifer Jenkins, author of Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, is joined by legal scholar James Boyle for a conversation about how copyright law influences everything in our modern world from sampling and streaming to remix culture, and what that means for creators.

Grab your copy of Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/music-copyright-creativity-and-culture-9780190945930

This conversation was recorded on 4/10/2025. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/music-copyright-creativity-and-culture

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

Authors James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs join librarian Shari Laster to discuss their book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future. From print to digital, they explore how gaps in preservation threaten accountability, research, and democracy itself—and what must be done to safeguard the public record in an age when vital materials can disappear with the click of a button.

Grab your copy of Preserving Government Information: https://freegovinfo.info/pgi

This conversation was recorded on 8/28/2025. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/preserving-government-information-book-talk

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge 

Authors Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen join historian Abby Smith Rumsey to discuss their acclaimed book The Library: A Fragile History—a sweeping exploration of how libraries have been built, destroyed, cherished, and reinvented over the centuries. From ancient archives to modern public libraries, they trace the people, politics, and passions behind the world’s great collections, and reflect on the enduring—and vulnerable—idea of the library itself.

This conversation was recorded on 7/20/2022. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/the-library-a-fragile-history

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

Erin Malone, author of In Through the Side Door, joins designer and writer Abby Covert for a conversation about the women who helped pioneer user experience and interaction design. From the early days of desktop computing to today’s digital interfaces, Malone traces how women brought insights from design, psychology, and engineering to shape the way we interact with technology—often working behind the scenes, and against the odds. This conversation explores the legacy of these trailblazers and the ongoing push for equity in tech and design.

This conversation was recorded on 6/12/2025. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/in-through-the-side-door

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

What rights do libraries, archives, and memory institutions need to preserve our digital heritage? In this episode, we explore the "Our Future Memory" campaign and the Statement on Four Digital Rights, a global call to action to secure the legal rights libraries and other memory institutions need in the digital age. Featuring voices from around the world, this conversation highlights the urgent need for policy change to ensure long-term access to knowledge—before it's lost.

This conversation was recorded in July 2025.

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

Recorded live at the Internet Archive Canada in Vancouver, this discussion features historian Ian Milligan, author of Averting the Digital Dark Age, in conversation with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. Guided by journalist Takara Small, the discussion explores Canada’s role in preserving our digital heritage—and why safeguarding born-digital history is more urgent than ever.

Grab your copy of Averting the Digital Dark Age: https://www.ianmilligan.ca/publication/averting-the-digital-dark-age/

This conversation was recorded on 5/27/2025.

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge