The Films You Are Not Allowed to See
May 2, 2023 12:49 pm ET Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto Ted Rall rightly worries that many worthwhile titles aren’t available on streaming services or even DVD (“The DVD’s Demise Leaves Many Films Gone With the Wind,” op-ed, April 28). But a government-funded lending library isn’t the answer. That many titles are already available as bootlegged DVDs shows that the market would be happy to supply them. The problem is that Hollywood has persuaded Congress to keep copyright protection in force all the way to 1923, and then sits on those rights, leaving thousands of titles to molder in its archives. This was bad enough when most of the missing titles would have had negligible audiences in any case. The danger today is that copyright will be used as a weapon to suppress films that millions of people care about. Disney President Robert
Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Ted Rall rightly worries that many worthwhile titles aren’t available on streaming services or even DVD (“The DVD’s Demise Leaves Many Films Gone With the Wind,” op-ed, April 28). But a government-funded lending library isn’t the answer. That many titles are already available as bootlegged DVDs shows that the market would be happy to supply them. The problem is that Hollywood has persuaded Congress to keep copyright protection in force all the way to 1923, and then sits on those rights, leaving thousands of titles to molder in its archives.
This was bad enough when most of the missing titles would have had negligible audiences in any case. The danger today is that copyright will be used as a weapon to suppress films that millions of people care about. Disney President Robert Iger recently said that at least one of the company’s titles (“Song of the South”) is “not appropriate in today’s world.” How long will it be before “Gone With the Wind” similarly disappears down the memory hole?
Stephen M. Maurer
University of California at Berkeley
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