Can we define the scope of the problem a bit more?
How many recently-made movies can’t be rented or bought? My impression is quite few. And the ones that can’t be rented or bought are mostly temporarily in that state probably because they’re working on the business side of distribution.
There’s issues with the actor’s appearances, music rights and distribution. The studio may own the movie itself, but not the right to exhibit it anywhere other than an movie theater. Preparing it for exhibition/release anywhere else may require renegociating the rights and royalties. If everyone doesn’t agree, the movie can’t be released.
Also, the studio/creator may (for whatever reason) not to release the film. As long as George Lucas has his way, the original versions of the Star Wars trilogy will never be seen again.
Then there’s some films that are so politically or socially sensitive or offensive, they may never be available in certain countries. A prime example is Song of the South. It remains to be seen if it will be available on Disney’s upcoming streaming service for the U.S.
I wish. Netflix’s DVD offerings has plenty of gaps. I have been waiting years for several non-obscure, relatively recent films to become available via Neflix disc.
A few random examples: Barfly, The Thief of Bagdad, The Trip To Bountiful, Everyone Says I Love You, Runaway Train, A Bronx Tale, and Bagdad Cafe.
mmm
Studios want to maintain as tight control of their property as possible and if there’s money to be made, they want as big a piece of the pie as possible. In the 80’s, some studios switched to a rental only model as they saw video stores making much more profit and Disney went to a limited time release schedule to increase demand and control distribution.
Even streaming doesn’t guarantee availability for everyone forever. As mentioned, streaming can be discontinued at any time depending on the studio/service contract terms or just because the movie takes up storage space that could be used for something else (this is why films and videotapes were/still are destroyed).
There are probably thousands of full-length movies that are not public domain on YouTube. I find them all the time.
Why aren’t they removed? My guess is that the rightsholder is a defunct corporate entity. Only the rightsholder can get a YouTube posting taken down for copyright violation. But that also means that there is nobody to negotiate with to license the rights legally.
The storage space required to keep a movie, even in really high definition are pretty negligible these days. Uncompressed 4K amounts to about 10TB for an average-length movie. That’s maybe $100/year in storage costs for a big player.
And at the sizes that video is actually streamed, it’s much less. And going forward the cost keeps dropping.
If someone can foresee any appreciable current or future market for this thing, storage costs are not likely relevant to the decision.
The problem is that for lots of movies, there just isn’t any market. It might sound really cool to have an archive of every movie ever made. But is anyone going to watch the 43rd-best-known movie made in 1947? Or one of the eminently-forgettable made-for-TV movies from the 1970s? Before someone’s going to bother digitizing those or not just chucking the tapes from the storage unit, you have to make a plausible argument that more than zero people are going to subscribe to your service because you have those movies, or pay an extra $1 per month. I don’t see one.
Even with music, it’s not as straightforward as you say, There’s a huge amount of Japanese music, for example, that is not available in the US on iTunes or Spotify. Japanese music publishers generally don’t give permission for their music to be downloaded or streamed outside Japan. You can order CDs to be shipped from Japan, and indeed I have, but it’s a pain and expensive.
TCM shows them all day long. :smack:
As iamthewalrus said, it depends what you mean by “these movies”. There are on the order of half a million movies and 3 million TV shows that have ever been made, including the output of world industry leaders in India and Nigeria as well as Hollywood and other film industries.
Amazon has hundreds of thousands of these items available for rent or purchase. I’m still waiting for someone to offer an example of a particular movie that there’s literally no way to legally watch via individual rental or purchase or streaming service. (I’m sure that many such do exist, but other than kunilou’s Jackie Gleason example, none seem to have been mentioned here.)
Seems to me that you’ve got two separate complaints mixed up here:
Too many movies are simply entirely unavailable in any form, which is doubtless true for some movies but ISTM is much less true overall than you suggest; and
Too many movies are not easily available for streaming as part of a subscription service. Which is doubtless true, for various economic and legal reasons previously discussed, but is not the same thing as the previous statement.
There’s no technical reason why every movie that was ever made, assuming a copy still exists, isn’t digitized and made readily available to the public.
There may be legal reasons why some movies aren’t available, but not technical. Cost? Perhaps the cost-benefit analysis is flawed. Granted, the cost to digitize and present one particular movie might exceed the income derived over a short length of time, but could this be the wrong way to approach it?
As an example, I used to frequent Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee when VHS rental was the norm. Unlike Blockbuster, which bought 50 copies of each new movie, Donovan & Heidi Brandt (it was a family business) only bought one copy. But they would buy one copy of almost anything that they could find, so long after 49 copies of the Blockbuster title were gone, Saturday Matinee had their one-and-only copy which served their specialty clientele quite well. And their collection, if counted in titles, probably exceeded Blockbuster by a factor of 1000 or more.
I once ordered, online, an obscure title that Eddie Brandt didn’t have, and Donovan offered to pay my cost if I would sell it to him. He didn’t care what the title was, he just wanted to expand his rental collection.
As a result of this collection philosophy, Saturday Matinee became the go-to location for Hollywood researchers. They even had old cowboy single-reelers from the 1930’s.
My point is some organization could take a similar philosophy, and collect/digitize as many titles as possible, realizing that they may lose money on some, but regain it as a collection. Don’t supermarkets have loss leaders that work much the same way?
There are, as you point out, legal reasons why no one has made a digital Saturday Matinee. The first sale doctrine means that if Eddie could get a physical copy of something, he could rent it out without permission from anyone. Even if the economics were so-so for a given movie, you’re right that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
But you can’t do that with streaming. If you find an old print of some old movie and digitize it, then you have (maybe) broken copyright law. You absolutely have if you try to rent that copy to anyone unless the movie is in the public domain.
There is an organization that takes a similar philosophy toward movies that are in the public domain. Archive.org.
A post on that site is revealing.
Collectors have always had bootleg copies of movies, radio, and television - transcription records, audio tapes, 16 mm prints, kinescopes, video recordings, CDs and DVDs, pirated streams - that they shared with one another regardless of whether they held the rights. YouTube formalizes these shared baubles in a kind of quasi-legal state. Because of the collectors, thousands of titles are available when no legal edition has ever been released. Most authorities will overlook this because of the tremendous historic value and low possibility of monetary profit.
They couldn’t overlook a for-profit site dedicated to breaking the law, though, and that’s what it would require to have it all.
Not as similar as you might think. Archive.org apparently grabs anything they can find, but makes no attempt to contact copyright owners for streaming permission. I know this because I have found many videos–my own creations–that archive.org has in their catalog, and they never contacted me at all.
I am not advocating this sloppy legal practice. If someone did a streaming–Eddie Brandt type site, I would hope that each copyright owner would provide permission, and perhaps gain revenue from stuff that brings them zero right now. Yes, some owners might not be contactable, so the time would have to pass so they are in public domain.
Digitize everything, then work on individual titles. Someday they will be available but only if we plan ahead.
To respond to Exapno Mapcase’s Post #32, Donovan’s policy was if you were a customer of his, and you gave him a blank VHS tape, he would make a copy of something from a TV recording for you, then as long as you rented another, regular movie at the same time, you would get the copy also. He claimed this made it legal, and he made several copies for me under this policy.
An option not mentioned so far is the collections of 50 SF/Western/Comedies available for not very much from some distributors. I was given the comedy one, which has some real crap on it but it also has Steamboat Bill Jr., some Stan Laurel silents from before he teamed with Hardy and Beat the Devil with Bogart.
I do Netflix DVDs, and 90% of my queue is not available on streaming, though they don’t have everything. Some stuff, like Intolerance, I found on YouTube. But not a very good copy.
And there are bootlegs. My copy of “Hellzapoppin’” is I suspect. I’d happily buy a legit one if anyone ever came out with it.
But finding more movies than you’d ever have time to watch is pretty simple.
Ha. That’s an… interesting legal theory that has no real basis in law.
But also the proper response ought to be that no one cares about that sort of thing.
I’m strongly in favor of reducing copyright terms, requiring copyrights to be registered, and increasing the cost of registration as time goes on. If there’s someone actually producing and selling a work that they own the rights to, I’m fine with them doing so. If it’s effectively abandoned, let’s clear things out and let people enjoy old movies.
There was never any logical basis for retroactive copyright extensions. It was a pure cash grab. Luckily (?) it appears that Congress is too dysfunctional to pass another one at the moment.
In my view, there is no legal basis either. The Copyright Clause in the U.S. Constitution provides that Congress has the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Retroactive copyright extension does nothing to promote the arts. Walt Disney didn’t climb up from his grave and go back in time to make more films in the 1930’s because we extended copyright protection on the films that he did make back then.
A few years ago, there was a company that offered to stream movies without having negotiated for streaming rights. They would put a physical DVD copy of the movie you wanted to watch in a DVD player in their data center and then stream the video signal to you. It seemed to get around the need to negotiate streaming rights but they were sued out of existence by the studios.
This does seem like it maybe should be allowable, although it’s hard to say.
On the one hand, we probably shouldn’t protect existing business models from technological advancement. On the other, it’s fairly easy to see how technological advancement could completely upend the concept of publishing in general.
Imagine that this company had prevailed, and this was deemed reasonable use under the first sale doctrine. What’s to stop the company from building a DVD player that has 15 independent lasers so that 15 viewers can use the same physical DVD? If the data stream is the thing the user is controlling, then each one has their own data stream reader. You could make an eBook service that sent a compressed video stream of individual pages to readers. Only need to buy enough copies that you can point enough cameras at each individual page for the number of simultaneous users you have. And so on.
There are ways for publishers to react to the economic shocks these technological advancements would create, but most of them are pretty terrible.
Here’s a list of 12 Great Sites to Stream Movies and Television Shows for Free.
Classic Cinema Online looks good for old movies.