Outdated copyright laws

Of Glyn Moody

Physical books can be bought, shared and read in libraries very easily. Physical films, on the other hand, are difficult to acquire, share, or archive. Writing in the Guardian, director Charlie Shackleton says that 90% of archive collections consist of films that will never be shown again. Furthermore, he points out that as the streaming becomes the main way people watch movies, the situation is getting worse and it does not get better:

Such films [held in archives] are at least well preserved, but only 10% of them are lucky and attract the caution of the public. Any movie "purchased" from Amazon Prime is yours to watch only as long as Amazon retains the copyright owner's permission to show it to you. And if copyright holders themselves couldn't be trusted to protect our cultural heritage when films were still physical things that could be organized and inventoried, they seem unlikely to be trusted in the digital age.

Timothy B Lee provides some tough numbers to reveal how bad things are:

Fifteen years ago, you could find almost anything on Netflix, from the latest blockbusters to classic movies to popular TV series. In all, Netflix had about 60.000 titles.

Today, Netflix streaming service has only about one-tenth of most titles available. While it has amazing original content, its overall list is not impressive.

He also has an explanation for why this happens:

The streaming revolution provides consumers with unprecedented convenience. But he had the paraenergy to leave many consumers with a narrower range of choices and a more fragmented market. And that's not because of technological or financial limitations — it's because the law gives copyright holders more control over streaming older movies than it does over DVD rentals.

The rest of Lee's post in Full Stack Economics explores ways to address this issue. Drawing from one interesting paper by Mark A. Lemley, which proposes the use of the concept of "fair use" to allow third parties to transmit material if it is not commercially available. Lee relies on this idea, proposing that there should be a mandatory licensing system for streaming video content that is no longer available for commercial use.

We definitely need some kind of solution.

Without this solution, film footage that should enter the public domain once their copyrights expire will never do so, because they will no longer exist digitally copies that we can share. It would be a tragic outcome if advances in technology combined with antiquated copyright laws led to the loss of large parts of film culture.

As Lemley says:

In the past we may have aspired to a world in which all the works of history would be available forever. Now this is a feasible goal. Copyright should not hinder him.

Indeed, it should not. Tear down these walls

Article Source: https://walledculture.org/

Translation: https://openstandards.ellak.gr