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Thursday, April 14, 2022
Here’s Why Bruce Willis’ ‘Moonlighting’ Isn’t Streaming Anywhere
www.thewrap.com: On March 30, Bruce Willis’ family announced on social media that he would retire from acting because of an ongoing struggle with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects a person’s cognitive function and ability to communicate.
I have no stake in ever seeing Moonlighting but it is disappointing to think about all of the various pieces of recorded media that will one day be essentially irretrievable due to laws and contracts retroactively barring access to the media in question. Perhaps some day in the future things will clear up or laws will change that will bring this specific piece of media to a wider audience via streaming. But were this a more well-desired piece of media I have no doubt that an enterprising individual somewhere will rip the video files from the DVD or VHS sets and upload them to be pirated. And I guess that's all well and good if money is just being left on the table and there is no market for the content people desire. But I can see this being a bigger issue in the future with content that never saw a physical release and was only ever released via streaming.
Though I imagine most new content these days is recorded by users regardless of the legality of said actions.
I completely agree that we should be protecting the work artists make, but it feels – ah – for me to look at those big companies like Disney who are trying to gauge what is worth keeping what is not. In the article, they talked about the swap to “similar” songs but changing anything from an original product also involves changing its meaning of it. That is why it is so hard – for better or for worse – to update plays according to new realizations we are making as a collective of artists and as a society. This story leads me to wonder how much we have lost because of some copyright law that got right in the middle of it. This sounds silly, but could the iconic scene in Shrek 2 featuring “I Need A Hero” be cut or revised because whoever owns it next wants to cut expenses? In that case, the movie would just not be the same, which is the point I’m trying to make here.
2 comments:
I have no stake in ever seeing Moonlighting but it is disappointing to think about all of the various pieces of recorded media that will one day be essentially irretrievable due to laws and contracts retroactively barring access to the media in question. Perhaps some day in the future things will clear up or laws will change that will bring this specific piece of media to a wider audience via streaming. But were this a more well-desired piece of media I have no doubt that an enterprising individual somewhere will rip the video files from the DVD or VHS sets and upload them to be pirated. And I guess that's all well and good if money is just being left on the table and there is no market for the content people desire. But I can see this being a bigger issue in the future with content that never saw a physical release and was only ever released via streaming.
Though I imagine most new content these days is recorded by users regardless of the legality of said actions.
I completely agree that we should be protecting the work artists make, but it feels – ah – for me to look at those big companies like Disney who are trying to gauge what is worth keeping what is not. In the article, they talked about the swap to “similar” songs but changing anything from an original product also involves changing its meaning of it. That is why it is so hard – for better or for worse – to update plays according to new realizations we are making as a collective of artists and as a society. This story leads me to wonder how much we have lost because of some copyright law that got right in the middle of it. This sounds silly, but could the iconic scene in Shrek 2 featuring “I Need A Hero” be cut or revised because whoever owns it next wants to cut expenses? In that case, the movie would just not be the same, which is the point I’m trying to make here.
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