19 Jan
2003
19 Jan
'03
11:30 a.m.
Wayne M. Smith wrote:
I wasn't arguing anything.
It seems to me that you were disputing the idea that works entering the
public domain would be a good thing. Maybe I misremember what you wrote
earlier. If so, I apologize.
UCLA is not going to "restore" a public
domain picture like Royal
Wedding, because it doesn't need restoring. The original interpositives
reside in a temperature controlled vault in Colorado and are in
relatively good shape. Nor, however, is anyone going to spend the money
(usually around $200,000) it would require to prepare a new master from
the original source materials and do the necessary clean up on the audio
and video. Sure, there are some people who will spend the extra dollars
for restored print, but not nearly enough to justify the cost.
So it seems like your position is:
1) With the current perptual copyright system, there will never be a
good "restored" version of Royal Wedding, because the studio doesn't
believe it would make (sufficient) money from it.
2) If worked entered the public domain, there would never be a good
"restored" version of them, because no one would have the original
interpositives to work from, and no one would be willing to spend
the money.
Since the end result of both options is the same, this hardly seems to be
a compelling argument for NOT allowing copyrights to expire.
For software, where the cost of "remastering" an old release would be
negligible, there's even less rationale for a copyright system that
allows a copyright owner to suppress copying and distribution of old
works.