[opendtv] Re: Wright Issues Call To Copyright Action
- From: "John Willkie" <johnwillkie@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 12:32:16 -0800
Great points, Henry. I found, in buying rights to air programs/movies, that
the sale was more important than anything, including content. If one had
any question about technical details or the like, the distributor would say:
"Oh, for that, you have to talk to the lab."
These assets is/were valuable, so valuable that the actual handling of the
assets was out-sourced to a paid laboratory. So, when the rentals stopped
coming in, the lab (not the owner) placed the assets in one of a series of
increasingly worse storage environment.
And, if you wanted a fresh copy from a master print, you had to pay for it,
and then, the fresh print went back to the lab, where it was treated like
the old copies. And, since every station that aired a movie retained the
right to edit the movie, they usually did this to the actual distribution
copies, since otherwise, they would have to ask the lab to strike a new
copy. Labs seldom had the rights to do this, and few stations could bear
the cost.
Did I recently mention the time that KABC-TV in Los Angeles showed "Cabaret"
as a 3:30 movie, only by removing all the musical numbers from the film?
(Movies is/were sold in packages, not individual titles; I always wondered
how that alone enabled Hollywood to increase the amount of "funny
accounting." Ever hear of a residual owner that audited their payments and
did not find the studio owing them much more money than the audit cost?)
Digital will help some of these aspects, but I've found that digital copies
can mean that their more likely to deteriorated than the celluloid prints
you speak of turning to dust. At least when digital storage devices fail,
they are usually not explosive in the process.
How many times have you heard of a movie, long thought to be lost to time,
that was resurrected because some retired projectionist liked the movie, and
stored reels of the film in the back of a barn, under piles of pig manure?
Such folks did not have the right to do that, but bless their acts in
retrospect!
A few decades from now (increased tempo in releasing movies), the digital
equivalent will be "was reconstructed from a near-pristine copy that had
been illegally downloaded decades before."
John Willkie
-----Original Message-----
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Henry Baker
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 11:34 AM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Re: Wright Issues Call To Copyright Action
Am I the only one that thinks that it is the height of irony that the _only_
reason we have copies of the earliest movies today is because the copyright
office
required that, in order to get a copyright, you had to deposit a hard copy
print
of the movie with the copyright office. This meant printing the entire
movie out
on paper.
The wizards of Hollywood have been so aggressive in stamping out illegal
copies,
and so incompetent at storing their own copies, that a huge fraction of
early
movies have now gone up in smoke (literally) or decomposed into explosive
dust.
They keep telling Congress about how valuable this stuff is -- _every_ item,
no
matter how worthless, has the same copyright treatment, and (unlike patents)
there
are no fees to pay to keep up the copyright -- and yet they do nothing to
protect
these "valuable" assets.
At 10:56 AM 10/30/2004, Tom Barry wrote:
>I would agree, except that to grant any extensions, a digital
>non-encrypted copy should be required to be deposited for safe keeping
>with the Library of Congress. We have the technology to keep all this
>now and it would protect against copyright extension via DRM. The
>escrowed copies would become publicly available for reasonable cost
>after the copyright expired and they entered the public domain.
>
>- Tom
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