The vast majority of films are never seen, never watched. If they still exist at all, they sit in private repositories and rot. Why? Because there’s no profit in preserving these films.
But what happens if film buffs and historians try to preserve those films, restore the prints, and make them available to the public? Well, then, the film buffs and historians risk getting sued - there’s plenty of profit in suing people, after all.
It’s yet another perverse incentive created by the American copyright system. From a letter to Congress written by supporters of the Eric Eldred Act:
The copyright system is a fabulous method for encouraging innovation and creativity. But its lengthy period of protection comes with a price. The vast majority of works — which only have a commercial life of a few years — are legally locked up for a century, together with the one or two percent of works that have more lasting commercial value. This system has a particularly tragic effect upon film, which in many respects was the medium of the 20th century. The film formats of the last century are all prone to various kinds of decay. They cannot simply be left in the back of a vault until the copyright term expires. Of the tens or hundreds of thousands of movies made before 1950, fully 50% are irretrievably lost. For films made before 1929, the loss rate is far worse: 80% of films of the 1920’s, and 90% of films from the 1910’s are gone. The nation’s great public and private archives currently labor under an unnecessary legal threat as they seek to preserve the films that remain. The same is true of the academic, volunteer, and Internet film archive communities and of the stock—film and documentary film industries.
The Eric Eldred Act is a way of allowing “abandoned works” to be released to the public domain. It would require copyright holders to pay a low registration fee (say, one dollar) after fifty years to maintain their ownership of the copyright. Otherwise, the work becomes public domain, and the scholars, archivists and preservationists can have at it. It’s a simple, straightforward, and cheap way of addressing a real problem.
(Frankly, I’d go a lot further to reform copyright than just the Eric Eldred Act - but the EEA is a good, moderate start.)
Found via Nathan Newman.
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June 13th, 2003 at 11:16 pm
Frankly, I’d go a lot further to reform copyright than just the Eric Eldred Act
Like what?
Don’t take me the wrong way here, Amp, I’m genuinely curious, I don’t know that much about details of the copyright laws other than the fact that it can be changed on Michael Eisner’s whim . . .
This comment was written by Raznor.Report this comment to the moderators
June 16th, 2003 at 4:42 am
Copyright is a strange thing. If I were a large corporation and I decided to rip someone off, I could get away with it. If I am an individual and I decide to rip off a large corporation - well, you can guess.
Copyright does not protect innovators, but large corporations. Originally it was a good system to protect books and sheet music from being hi-jacked. Now it has become hopelessly deformed by recorded music, film and the rest. We need to protect authors more rigorously while preventing corporations from getting monopoly profits.
This comment was written by Larry Lurex.Report this comment to the moderators
November 20th, 2003 at 10:26 am
How do copyright laws affect filmmaking/film distribution?
This comment was written by Bryce.Report this comment to the moderators