How Corporations Are Destroying America's Cultural Heritage
from the short-term-profits-outweigh-long-term-value dept
Kevin Kelly has a great op ed piece in the NY Times refuting one of the main arguments of Hollywood concerning why copyright protection needs to extend even futher into the future. Jack Valenti claims that the movie studios need this protection in order to make it worth their while to digitize old movies – even though it seems plenty of old movies are quickly degrading into nothing. However, Kelly points out that music fans, on their own, have basically digitized a large majority of all music recordings ever made. Why wouldn’t they also digitize old movies? Instead of keeping these old movies locked up in vaults somewhere where no one will ever see them again, movie buffs could be allowed to digitize these movies and opening up our cultural heritage to a new generation of fans who otherwise would never have the chance to see these movies.
