Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 04/09/13 01:17, ixid wrote:
> On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 20:25:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Fer gawd's sake, why not put their entire freakin' back catalog on it?
>>
>> For example, there's a "sampling" of a few of Julia Childs' shows from the
>> 60's. Why not put them all on?
>
> The deliberate scarcity of entertainment, or at least enforcement of the new and
> unavailability of the old is a part of their plan. Music is similar in that it's
> hard to get hold of lots of older recordings through legal channels. They don't
> want the consumer to have freedom.

That's not entirely fair.  Often the reason why older shows are difficult to get 
hold of is because back then distribution rights were not managed 
comprehensively as they are now, because no one ever thought there'd be a need 
to (e.g. before there was ever such a thing as video tapes or DVDs, let alone 
streaming).

The result is that whoever owns the physical recordings may not have good enough 
documentation to know who they have to negotiate with in order to ensure a 
certain kind of distribution rights, and so they can't distribute even if they 
want to.

So, for example, with an older TV series the original contracts would probably 
have covered TV repeats but not distribution.  In order to issue a DVD or 
distribute via streaming media or download, the TV studio would likely have to 
negotiate and secure new contracts with not just the writer, director and 
production company but also with all the performers, possibly many of the crew, 
and very likely also the music composer and any musicians who performed on the 
soundtrack.

There can also be confusion over who holds the copyright to various material, 
and so on.

All of that makes it _very_ difficult to release some older material, and unless 
the prospective income is large enough, companies are unlikely to feel it's 
worth doing all the legwork tracing the different rights holders.

Just as one example: Disney has a huge amount of stuff in its archives which it 
would love to release as DVD extras, but they can't because of issues like these.