Comment Re:Good (Score 4, Insightful) 302
However, if it's in the public domain, there is no monetary incentive to locate, digitize, and restore such a film. It either sits in a vault somewhere, decomposing (maybe even on nitrate film - egad!), or maybe it was transferred onto videotape before its copyright expired.
Counter argument: if the copyright holder felt that there was money to be made by transferring to another medium and selling, it would have already happened.
Instead, all those nitrate copies are locked away and will either burn or decompose. Many of those old movies have copies lurking away, open to non-copyright holders if they had the right to make updated copies and release them. But copyright prevents this.