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CBS Refuses To Preserve Jack Benny Footage
goosman writes "The president of the International Jack Benny Fan Club had the opportunity to review some holdings of the CBS vaults while assisting them with some transfers. In the vaults she found 25 shows on film that were unreleased, but in the public domain. The IJBFC offered to pay for the digitization and preservation of these shows; they got a letter of enthusiastic support from the Benny estate. CBS has so far refused to allow this preservation to happen." BoingBoing and TechDirt have both covered this act of cultural destruction.
I've been complaining about this for a while regarding source code. The notable example I can remember pointing this out was Star Control 2 (Ur Quan Masters is the name of the Open Source release.) Due to the fact that they weren't required to SUPPLY a copy of their copyrighted work/code/etc in order to obtain copyright, the original source code for the DOS version of the game was lost years ago. Toys for Bob, the guys who had programmed it (But not distributed it, which is why it's not called the SC2 Open Source release) decided after many years of fan interest to allow a full open source release of the game, datafiles and all. However they'd lost the master source code for the game years before, which resulted in the release instead of the 3do version of the source code, which thankfully HAD survived all these years. My point with this being: In the 50-100 years or so when CP/M, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, Microsoft Windows 1.0, etc should be coming out of copyright, allowing people three to five generations from now to benefit from being able to explore the code behind the massively successful and historic works, those works will not exist, because in the greatest travesty of this generation (and there are many, both great and small), all of that information, code, documents, film, etc will be lost, because nobody other than the 'owners' was allowed to look at, back up, save, translate, and otherwise secure those culturally significant treasures for future generations. (And yes some people might not consider these items 'treasures' but they are important to both outlook and understanding of what went on during the latter half of the 20th century on through to today.
Your point is well taken if you automatically assume that everything is copyrighted. It technically is today, but not in practice.
Lincoln's estate should not be required to make his journals available because he never sought copyright protection for them. Same goes for your private works.
CBS did seek such protections for their works, therefore, they should be required to make them available if they are the only copies in existence.
If you want the power of copyright, you must release your works (that's the point of copyright), and should be required to make a copy on demand if your copy is the only one available. Preferably we'd have a copy on file at the Library of Congress, but we're not there yet.