Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
My personal idea on copyright is that after an initial short copyright period, that copyright should expire if it's not commercially available in a common format for 10 years. Past that corporate copyright isn't really a battle I'm that interested in fighting.
As a movie buff, my primary objection to movie copyright is the number of works that are lost over the years because of copyright. That's why I strongly support the idea that to obtain copyright for books, music and movies, you should have to provide two copies of the work in a common format to the Library of Congress (US copyright, of course).
It's going to be a long time before 120 verses 100 becomes significant. I suspect that most of the silent era movies lapsed into PD before 78. A lot of movies, even up through the 60's have lapsed into PD simply because they didn't have enough long term commercial value for the copyright holder to make the effort.
I recently noticed that a number of the old Tarzan movies have popped up in iTunes. I'm pretty sure they were not there a year ago. It makes me wonder if the copyright holder finally cleaned them up and released them, or if they had lapsed into PD. Not exactly great art, but a tremendous cultural icon. The old movie Tarzan yell is instantly recognizable to most people of my generation. I grew up watching old Tarzan movies on TV.
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The Tarzan Movies were released by the controlling studio on DVD over a decade ago.