[Dalewyn]

>a sizable portion of the 400,000 recordings are from disks that quite literally broke down after capture. Those disks are the last copies of those recordings. Ever.

Somewhere, there was a critical failure of risk assessment and management.

[faeranne]

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the entirety of IA's existence is a "critical failure of risk assessment" now. Their existence forces companies to deal with the one competitor they can't beat, their past selves. The question we begin to ask here is "This is the only place that was able and ready to accept and preserve these otherwise permanently lost works. Do we let copyright ensure the destruction of itself, or is culture and history more important?"

[Dalewyn]

Ah, you're misunderstanding me.

In the course of preservation, the Rule That Shall Not Be Violated(tm) is that anything which would lead to significant and irreversible damage or destruction of the artifact is off limits. Especially if the artifact is irreplacable.

Recording the audio off of those disks should not have happened if it was already understood or reasonably expected that doing so would lead to their destruction. Whoever gave the OK on that exhibited a critical failure of risk assessment and management.