Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), “Mission to the Unknown” (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist.”
If I build a house, you buy it, that’s it. I worked and got paid. Why in the ever loving fuck do people get paid for work they did 30, 40, 70 years ago?!
Because before this, artists, especially musicians and composers, some of the most famous in history, were dying in the gutter as paupers.
Mozart.
Vivaldi.
Stephen Foster.
Schubert.
It’s not as simple as I may seem to be implying, but the short version is that copyright was a huge boon to the creative industry, or at least to the artists.
At first.
The issue is now it’s about corporations and is way out of control.
That is, between your second and third sentence is the grey area.
Because the music, TV show, movie, or other media is a product they created and continue to sell copies of. If you build many copies of that house and sell more and more you continue getting paid.