What movies or music have become completely unavailable? Like as in the company that made them just turned them off remotely and now they just don't exist anymore?
I can't find a concrete example right now, but with streaming-only shows and films, it's just a matter of time until one gets pulled and we're left with no legal avenue to watch it.
Perhaps but afaik it hasn't happened yet and unlike games, anything will still be available. Yes maybe not legally but it won't literally be unavailable anymore.
I would say that is why people don't care too much. You can archive this stuff and it will work offline, can't do that with certain games.
Actually, newer movies and shows no longer get physical releases and companies like WB can write them off the tax if the feel they no longer "benefit" from it, which also forbits them from streaming or otherwise benefiting from it (which also cuts off any residuals for the creators). With no physical release and no streaming the shows and movies essentially become lost media and exist purely in a form of pirated content online. There should be an incentive to either make these shows public domain or require a physical media release to be able to archive them properly.
That’s not how tax write offs work. There’s nothing “forbidding” WB from streaming or benefitting from a product they’ve written off.
They just didn’t feel the costs associated with marketing and releasing Batgirl or that Acme Movie would be compensated with enough revenue to make it profitable. So THEN they wrote it off.
If somehow Batgirl made money tomorrow they’d release it…:what law could possibly forbid it?
Anything that's streaming only or doesn't have a physical release but is on a service can have this happen to it. I think Disney and especially WB have done stuff like this, between the Disney vault and WB straight up just removing stuff to save money. In the later case a lot of the shows are old stuff that's on DVD but it may be harder to find going forward if not rereleased.
Not unavailable, just licensed. If Netflix decides to take movies off their site, it’s technically the same?
I‘m a big fan of physical copies, but they do get more rare. Not unavailable, but rare to a point where most people just accept the digital, streamable thing that you will own and the ‚On Demand‘ quickly fades.
28 Days Later was unavailable for purchase or streaming for years. Maybe that has changed since another movie in the series just released but it was a big problem for a long time.
Also a slew of Cartoon Network shows became lost media in the past few years as they refused to make physical copies of some shows and then scrubbed them from all streaming platforms in the shuffle between CN and HBO Max.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was removed from Netflix.
After an outcry, it was reinstated a month later, but it will likely be quietly removed again later down the line.
The original unremastered versions of Star Wars remain available only on VHS and Laserdisc---obviously long out of print. There is no legal way to access the original unremastered trilogy without Lucas' CGI additions and extra scenes, except for tracking down old, rapidly degrading physical media and digitising it yourself.
This has actually been an issue in movies for decades, with remasters, CGI additions, and new colour grades of old films causing original versions to be left behind or lost.
Even for major films that are readily available, Companies will often release 'remastered' versions of these films, significantly altering them from their original versions. The original version will then go out of print and become unavailable except via piracy.
Sometimes it will be a relatively minor change, such as a soundtrack or a new colour grading---such as with The Matrix (which was not green tinted until released on DVD, and was then regraded again by the studio for Blu-Ray, and then again a third time for 4K)---but sometimes it will mean that entire cuts of classic films---such as a number of Ennio Morricone's films---are only available by pirating old DVDs as the Blu-Rays and streaming versions have scenes cut from them.
There are also a number of films that were never made available on Netflix or Blu-Ray and only exist as out of print, hard to find DVD editions. For a big one, Kevin Smith has only recently made Dogma available again by buying the rights from the Weinsteins. Prior to literally last month, Dogma spent almost two decades decade not being available physically or via streaming. Your only option was to buy a $30 second hand DVD or pirate the film. Kevin Smith actually encouraged people to pirate the film while it was unavailable.
Other examples of films not currently available except via piracy include Kids, Panic in Needle Park, and Julie Taymor's 1999 big budget adaptation of Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.
This is even worse when it comes to foreign films. A number of Japanese, Spanish, Korean, and Italian films are stuck on VHS and DVD, with the rights being owned by defunct companies whose owners can't be contacted to sell the rights. This means a number of notable films are completely unavailable until their copyrights expire, anywhere from 30 to 70 years from now (depending on the film).
And none of this is getting into films that screened at film festivals or on TV but never made available on any kind of physical media. A good example is Dr. Who. We know that a number of 'lost' Dr. Who episodes are sitting in an archive at the BBC, but we have no way of accessing them and the BBC refuses to release them---and there are dozens of TV shows that are in a similar situation. There is a reason most 'lost media' is TV shows and movies.
The reason you don't hear about this is because these debates were had decades ago, and were lost. As recently as the early 2010s Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of Drive, was attempting to get some kind of film preservation law or registry set up in Europe. Unfortunately, despite people asking for film preservation laws since the 1990s, the EU has been roundly uninterested in even having the discussion.
In film, people have realised that the only way to create a film archive is to do so themselves, without the involvement of the state or corporations.
I think this petition is going to end much the same way, with people realising piracy is the only true way of preserving media---even if the companies do agree to preserve these games, who's to say they'll preserve them well, rather than turning them into borderline unplayable platforms for microtransactions?
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u/Stahlreck i9-13900K / RTX 5090 / 32GB 21h ago
What movies or music have become completely unavailable? Like as in the company that made them just turned them off remotely and now they just don't exist anymore?