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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

You can tell this is authentically the industry insiders' own stunted understanding of the problem by the fact that the words 'copyright' and 'intellectual property' never appear as aspects of the challenge.

Storage is cheaper than ever before. Accumulated shared wisdom about older format, & open tools for forward- and up- conversions, keep growing. Communities of enthusiasts can now find each other & coordinate effectively on arbitrarily niche and old media.

Hollywood's policy of monopolizing the right-to-copy works, enforced with aggressive legal prosecutions and fragile proprietary technical-complexities, puts cultural history at extra risk.

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Stipulate for the discussion that you’re correct; what would your ideal preservation scenario look like? Hollywood DCP servers open to enthusiasts to allow copying of terabytes of movie data to other archives?

That and 6k (21MP) or 18k (63MP) film scans where applicable. Modern formats can’t quite handle that yet but soon, and mixed reality/projection displays will open up screen formats

A reasonable solution would be to recognize abandonware as a legal category under copyright law. If a company decides to tax write-off a work or let it go out of print (including print on demand for an obscene price) then revoke the copyright and put it in the public domain. Tax write offs that weren't ever released like Warner Bros has become infamous for of late should additionally be required to be publicly released. Uploading it to something like a "Warners Bros Tax Write offs" Youtube channel would be sufficient for preservation purposes.

If you do that, the preservation problem will take care of itself between organizations like The Internet Archive and the various piracy groups. This might also make it easier politically to crack down on the pirates who insist on distributed unauthorized copies of new releases by making them less sympathetic.

Or at least send a watermarked copy to the Library of Congress for future preservation. If those copies get out, the US can reimburse them or…something.

It is a little more complicated than you describe because copyright doesn't just apply to published or finished work. That means you are effectively advocating for the end of privacy.

For example, it is pretty common for famous or even some private peoples' diaries or letters to be published. Will you sell me a copy of every single one of your emails? Oh, you refuse to sell them? I guess that means you forfeit your copyright and now anyone can sell them.

The right for a creator to stop the distribution of their own work is pretty important. I agree that we should tweak the tax write-off process to maybe force that work into the public domain, but worked destroyed for tax purposes is only a tiny fraction of all abandonware.

Copyright law already recognizes a concept of "work for hire". Limiting the "abandonware" concept to only works for hire would trivially address your concerns.

It would also open up a trivial hole to exploit this. Lots of creative work, especially written work, is not done as work for hire. That would expand more the more you disincentivize that categorization.

If you forfeit your copyright for the purpose of a tax right off, and to abandon your responsibilities to the work, then your work reverts to the default status (prior to any copyright law) of public domain. (And, Yes, you better make sure you have the rights to public domain every part of the work, or you don't get the right off.)

If you retain ownership rights (+ responsibilities) then you don't get the tax write off.

That seems pretty simple, no?

Well yes.

Bring back the 28 year copyright term. Or something similarly sensible.

How much money would Disney lose if Independence Day, the top earning film 28 years ago would become free to replicate this year?

Independence Day? Probably not much.

Every bit of their content from the 90s? Likely a fair chunk. Not billions, but real money. That's a lot of the attraction of their streaming service, especially classics like their Princess movies.

If it's not even billions, is it even real money on the Disney scale? These guys rake in, what, sixty? seventy? billion bucks a year. You are losing ... one percent of that?

Consider it a marketing expense "old Disney hogged IP but we reformed look how cool we are" consider it an investment in up and coming creatives who one day very well might make a successful movie ...

Good question! Things that'd help:

• a founders-duration copyright term – at most 28 years from date-of-creation

• absolute statutory & precedential immunity for any copies made, or DRM-circumventing-technologies created/used, solely for non-commercial preservation – that is, only competing witht the rightsholder in the commercial market would be prosecutable

• whatever extra protections/enforcement options available with formal copyright-registration also come with the duty to deposit/escrow full-quality unencumbered versions with multiple responsible preservation institutions, from the Library of Congress to NGOs, who are free to release those versions at end-of-copyright

Storage is cheaper, but as the article states, the problem is mostly Indies who have no money. As someone who produced a film that was purchased by Netflix, I don't even know if any of the original RED camera footage exists. I think First Wife has an original Blu-ray burnt from the first director's cut with the original music that never made it into commercial production. It would still be pricey to store all the original footage (which is what you want to archive) in a 3-2-1 backup scenario for most small productions.

Spot on. I got about 2/3 of the way through looking for the specific problem, wondering if it was codec issues, backups, etc.

No, just mystical hand wringing about losing digital works. It's a procedural problem driven from the top.

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