Missing Movies (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Missing Movies (2018)

johnaugust.com

70 pointssmacktoward39 comments

> Piracy isn’t an answer to the problem

If the problem is, "me wanting to watch The Flamingo Kid tonight" piracy absolutely does solve that problem.

Also, the reason for this problem is that there is not sufficient commercial incentive to make a legal solution to this problem. There are fixes for this, changes could be made to copyright law, for example, that would make this problem a commercially viable one to resolve; however, there are few incentives to make changes that would allow this problem to be resolved. Piracy is certainly the easiest answer to this problem, and the only answer at the moment.

> Piracy is certainly the easiest answer to this problem, and the only answer at the moment.

The situation with these old films that have gone out of availability due to rights holders going out of business or no longer caring is a bit similar to the arcade machine ROM situation. The MAME community has done a great job of documenting the existence of and preserving the history of the ROMs they can find and highlighting the ROMs still missing while avoiding the legal quagmire by never distributing the ROM media itself. (what other people do on BitTorrent stays on BitTorrent).

Maybe similar techniques can work for these films.

Indexing is fine so long as you can still say a copy exists. But eventually it's like finding a medieval card-catalogue, and wondering what became of all of these other books by Euclid.

All they need is one good copy.

Instead of calling it 'piracy', call it 'archival work'. Done!

Distributed offsite redundant backup. (1, 2, 3 of backups)

I would love to see an update to copyright law that required a ‘renewal’ each year after 10 years that started at $10,000 and doubled each year thereafter.

Yes, or even a more drastic curve since 10 000 dollars is just pocket money for companies like Disney. Point is you could make it prohibitive to keep copyright over time.

Year 12 is $40.96m :-)

Reminds me of the story of the emperor and the chessboard. http://www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com/rice-and-chessbo...

That would be year 22, because renewals start at 10 years.

Good point, I think Mickey mouse is coming up on year 90, that would be a lot of cash

That's fine, if you've created something worth that much money, go get your 22 years of copyright. But the chances that you'll be there in year 32 are pretty damn low indeed and zero in year 42.

>The length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was short, 14 years, plus the ability to renew it one time, for 14 more.

I would love to go back to the original copyright act of 1790 law. We the people of the United States grant a monopoly with the understanding that society will be compensated for granting that monopoly in 28 years.

Same. The original duration of copyright made it tolerable. Although artificial, it's a reasonable social contract that enabled creators to get paid while also giving people free access to their works. People knew that the works they once paid for would enter the public domain within their lifetime. Everything created in the 80s and 90s should be public domain today.

They should at least do like they do with trademarks.

If the copyrighted work is not exploited for a certain time, it goes to the public domain. It leaves the right for authors to do as they please with their work, as long as they actually do something, while legitimizing "abandonware" at the same time.

Another example that wasn't on the list (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.

This also happens to books (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m...), and points even more to the cause. As soon as you go before the 1920s, works are in the public domain, and availability returns.

> I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris"

A search on Google Video seems to pop out a copy. Not great quality and has questionable copyright issues....

https://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=vid&q=%22...

youtube-dl.exe will copy it offline.

It's rare not to find fictional movies if you look at all sources, although many have quite low quality (700 meg rips)

Wow. I had mostly been searching through amazon, ebay, archive.org, but hadn't searched google video. Thank you very much.

I invented a method that I believed would allow the type of comprehensive library envisioned. I sold the idea to a company called VidAngel, who was sued by major studios and now owes approximately $62M to disney as damages.

Each movie was backed by a physical copy stored in their vault, and streamed only to the owner.

The ruling was a huge blow to fair use, and your rights as the owner of physical media.

I'm gonna bet that the music licensing for all of these films is a mess. Only licensed for so long, or for so many kinds of distribution. Some may be easy to deal with. Some may not. But who wants to find out? Who wants to open that can of worms and potentially get embroiled in lengthy, complicated negotiations with music labels?

This has happened to TV series too, like "Northern Exposure", where for the DVD release they replaced a lot of the music with public domain "elevator music":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Exposure#DVD_releases

I mean, one thing that seems missing from this analysis is that a lot of these titles really wouldn't generate much revenue.

iTunes do not actually want to bother spending money ingesting files et al on films that do not sell, and you have to sell a non-zero amount before you're not making a loss.

It mentions rights are a solvable problem, but solvable by who, and who will pay for it?

There was a discussion about a 'dead zone' of media relating to books because of overreaching copyright [1]. Since the economies of providing older copyrighted work aren't in high enough demand aren't incentivized enough, the works effectively become 'lost'.

There's a long tail to exploit, which I think Netflix, at least when it started out, benefited from, but in practice the works become effectively lost.

I've found at least one other example of an article talking about this effect relating to Zora Neale Hurston [2].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...

This isn't going to get solved. The reason that these movies aren't online is basically a lack of clarity on the IP rights to sell the movies as streaming. None of the contracts between the parties in the 70s had any provisions for online streaming, so it's a big unsolved mystery as to who is allowed to do what.

No studio's lawyers are going to open up a can of liability worms for a few thousand $3.99 rentals of some 70s movies.

Kind of surprised that he is surprised. It's fairly common that I want to watch a not obscure movie and cannot find it on any online service.

Thank God for libraries.

I was just looking for "The Last Train" (1999). Couldn't find it on netflix, amazon, ebay, or the library.

As someone who uses no online video streaming services, I’m surprised that the number of (old) movies available to stream is so high.

similarly related consumer unfriendly nonsense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault

I suspect Disney+ will kill this concept.

It won't. All it does is make it even easier for Disney to yank content until the next "special edition" which you'll need to pony up for in the shops at an extortionate retail price because of "special director's cut" or some other bollocks.

And then a year later they'll get around to showing that version on Disney+, possibly for a surcharge because "special edition".