
Missing Movies (2018) - smacktoward
https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies
======
thcipriani
> 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.

~~~
mrandish
> 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.

~~~
sdenton4
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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
ngold
>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.

~~~
matheusmoreira
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.

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MereInterest
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...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-
missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/)),
and points even more to the cause. As soon as you go before the 1920s, works
are in the public domain, and availability returns.

~~~
aaron695
> 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...](https://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=667&tbm=vid&q=%22So+This+is+Paris%22+1955&oq=%22So+This+is+Paris%22+1955)

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)

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

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pontifier
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.

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egypturnash
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?

~~~
UncleSlacky
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Exposure#DVD_releases)

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Mindwipe
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?

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abetusk
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...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-
hole-in-our-collective-memory-how-copyright-made-mid-century-books-
vanish/278209/)

[2]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/07/how-
copyright-law-hides-work-like-zora-neale-hurstons-new-book-from-the-public/)

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paggle
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.

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BeetleB
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.

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

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jgalt212
similarly related consumer unfriendly nonsense:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault)

~~~
rkuykendall-com
I suspect Disney+ will kill this concept.

~~~
teh_klev
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".

See also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369213)

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WalterBright
> including Sleeper

Sleeper rolled by on TV a year ago or so. It was far, far worse than I
remember it being :-(

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mark-r
I waited nearly forever to find "Real Genius" on DVD.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
That's weird, I own or owned Real Genius on DVD. I see it on Amazon? Do you
only purchase in-person?

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mark-r
At the time I was looking, I had had it for years on VHS and wanted to replace
it. I'm sure I looked online but it just wasn't available, anywhere. I don't
remember where or when I found it, but I was extremely happy.

~~~
WalterBright
One of my favorite movies. Not because it was that good, but because the
various incidents in the movie are exaggerations of things that actually
happened in the 1970s at Caltech. (Caltech wouldn't let them film it on
campus, but the film crew hired techers as extras anyway because their costume
department could not duplicate their look.)

~~~
mark-r
One of my favorites as well, which was why I was unhappy living with only a
VHS copy. It was quirky in all the right ways.

