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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Author
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Topic: MPAA: Kodi Abusers Are Growing Video Piracy Threat
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-31-2019 12:39 PM
quote: Martin McCaffrey
...not saying I agree with the current copyright law, but we have lost so much of film history as it is and I don't think the LOC is up to that degree of restoration and preservation.
Counter-intuitively, shortening copyright duration might actually encourage preservation and restoration.
While it is certainly true that longer copyright terms have encouraged rights holders to do more of their own preservation and restoration, there are two drawbacks for that.
1 - They can, and if market forces will allow it, do, charge top dollar for access to the results: in some cases, as much as it costs to see newly produced content. 2 - It encourages investment in a tiny minority of popular classics, and discourages investment in minority interest content, including curatorial investment in making it more popular. For example, why do you think The Red Shoes has undergone three major restorations since the 1980s? Because it's still in copyright, and it's a popular classic. Constantly restoring it keeps it in copyright, because the restoration is a work of intellectual property in itself, separate from the source material the restorers started with.
Let's say, for example, that copyright in all moving image content was limited to 20 years, after which it all drops into the public domain. The studios would no longer be able to make money out of their hit movies and TV shows after a couple of decades, and therefore they probably would cut back on investment in their archival operations. But the flip side of that would be that independent preservationists and restorers would be able to move in and work on that older material, at lower cost to them, and deliver the result at lower cost to the consumer. So if you think that at $20 for the BD, the restoration of Jaws I scanned from a 16mm 'scope print on a Moviestuff or a Tobin, and then cleaned up using Da Vinci on my Mac is too expensive for what it is, then a competitor can come along and do their own, and sell it for $10.
Furthermore, obscure movies from the 1970s that very few people have heard of that are currently sitting unrestored or re-released because the studios or big nonprofit archives can't do it because the math doesn't work for them, probably could be worked on by the new generation of home preservationists using the new generation of technology that has radically reduced the cost of entry to this profession, but currently isn't because of copyright restrictions.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-31-2019 01:57 PM
As a published author myself, the copyright system has worked against me, and helped to ensure that only a tiny audience will ever read my work. Of the two books I've written, the first is now out of print, and the second is so expensive that no-one apart from university libraries will ever buy it. I made almost nothing in royalties from it (about $150 since it was published), and if I had self-published the thing and sold it myself for $10 a copy, I'm sure it would have been read by thousands more people than have actually done so, despite the fact that I would also have been on my own as far as marketing and promotion was concerned. However, although I retain ownership of the copyright, I signed exclusive publication rights over to the publisher, meaning that anyone who wants to read it has little option but to cough up the $70.
I was using 20 years as a hypothetical example, not seriously suggesting it. IMHO, 50 years would be more reasonable. That would give whoever spent the money creating a work of IP every reasonable and fair chance of earning it back again, plus a reasonable profit.
I do agree completely that reducing copyright terms would discourage studio investment in back end preservation work, including the long-term passive conservation of physical masters. This is what happened before TV and then home video created an aftermarket for theatrical movies. One studio literally dumped tens of thousands of cans into the Pacific.
This debate has been had before: when the big nonprofit archives (LoC, MoMA, UCLA, British Film Institute, etc. etc.) started to preserve studio movies seriously in the 1950s and '60s, their critics pointed out that taxpayers should not be on the hook for preserving IP owned, and monetized, by others. Their response was that eventually that IP would expire, and these movies would be in the public domain, and that if the taxpayer accepted the bill to preserve books, paintings, [sarcasm alert]all the old Roman and Ancient Egyptian crap in the British Museum, etc. etc.[/sarcasm alert], then why don't movies qualify?
However - and this is my real point - the studios are already gaming the system, to extend the copyright term in effect indefinitely in the 0.01% of their holdings that are perpetual money earners for them, by "restoring" them at regular intervals (and thus creating a new copyright work) and trying to pull the previous version out of circulation.
Placing shorter and fairer limits on copyright duration, and building in more legal safeguards to encourage access to copyright expired material, would therefore be a net gain. The downside may well be, as you predict, that taxpayers have to fund more back end preservation, but I suspect that this bill would be more than offset by growth in cultural economic activity as a whole.
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Martin Brooks
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 900
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: May 2002
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posted 02-03-2019 06:12 PM
quote: Leo Enticknap
Counter-intuitively, shortening copyright duration might actually encourage preservation and restoration.
I don't agree. If you look at what happened with movies and TV shows that fell into the public domain and were issued by various companies on VHS, while those companies did make the items available, they were almost universally shoddy and unrestored. And the reason why is because no company wants to put money into something when you know that if it's even moderately successful, someone else will come along and re-release the same work and compete with you. In the analog era, it was hard to steal your version and make decent copies. But in the digital era, every copy is a master.
That's one of the reasons Universal never bothered releasing the early silent horror films on disc. If they were still copyrighted, they probably would have.
If you look at the publishing industry, you'll see bookstores carrying public domain titles, but it's mainly "the big hits": Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alexander Dumas, Oscar Wilde, Frankenstein, Dracula, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, the Oz stories, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc. And even there, publishers are reluctant because if any start selling, another publisher can come along and do a prettier cover and sell it for a dollar less and take away sales from the first publisher. Back in the day, the cost of typesetting kept "anyone" from doing this, but today, with OCR, it's not hard to simply take another edition of the book, capture it, and issue another edition.
Now with a book, one can argue that as long as it's legible and complete, it's good enough. But with a movie, crappy captures from bad source material ruins the film.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 02-03-2019 09:04 PM
As against which, audiences are now probably less tolerant of crappy captures from bad source material than they were in the pre-1080p era, because on anything better than a CRT NTSC TV, their crappiness has nowhere to hide.
quote: Martin Brooks
And the reason why is because no company wants to put money into something when you know that if it's even moderately successful, someone else will come along and re-release the same work and compete with you. In the analog era, it was hard to steal your version and make decent copies. But in the digital era, every copy is a master.
I wasn't arguing for letting them do that (take someone else's remastering and republish it). An act of remastering or restoration is itself a copyright work. For example, if I take a phonograph record from the 1920s, make a needle drop capture from it, then import the resulting raw .WAV file into Diamond Cut, apply an EQ curve, some noise reduction, and edit out some the more egregious pops and scratches, there are at least two copyrights in the final output from that process: the copyright in the original recording I started with (and potentially other copyrights nested within that, e.g. music publishing), and the copyright in the remastering that I did. If the source recording is public domain free and clear, the copyright still exists in my remastering. Someone else who owns another copy of the same record can do the same thing him- or herself, and they will own the copyright to their remastering. But they can't take mine and republish it (and in the case of audio material at any rate, digital forensic analysis makes this easy to detect, as this scandal demonstrated).
In the case of a movie, if the copyright in the originally released film is allowed to exist more or less forever (which is what the studios would like), then only the rights owner, or people they authorize, can publish re-releases or restorations. We are living with the situation that encourages: The Red Shoes gets six figures spent on it every decade or so, while 99% of the other surviving British movies from the late 1940s will never be seen again (other than by professional historians and researchers).
If, on the other hand, they were all in the public domain, then the archives holding them would be able to charge a reasonable access fee for anyone wanting to remaster the preservation material for publishing (the charge would be for physical access to the material, not copyright licensing), and anyone who felt they could make a reasonable profit out of publishing them would be able to do so. Hopefully, that would make it viable to publish material that is only likely to sell a few hundred copies, rather than several thousand being the minimum needed to make such a project possible.
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