I wanted to wake a old tv show the other day, and there’s no way to get it on iTunes/ Netflix/DVD. And all the ones on YouTube and other sites have been copyright strikes.
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The money doesn’t just stop dead when a show goes off the air.
They will want to sell box sets of dvds of the show. Maybe they want to sell the rights to stream it through any of the various services. They could sell the rights to distribute it in other regions. Reruns in the future are possible.
All of that tends to fall apart if it is freely available online.
Because it is still their intellectual property. Just because someone decides to share something (illegally) made by someone else when it is no longer available doesn’t make it right.
They have to enforce their copyright every single time or it sets a legal precedent for others to steal their IP, and may end up effectively voiding their copyright if they don’t enforce it
Because that show still has value. Just because they aren’t making money on it at the moment doesn’t mean they never will. A prolific celebrity like Betty White passes away, and there is increased interest in TV shows she did in the 1950s no one cared about before.
Also, they are almost certainly showing it somewhere. There are dozens of streaming services out there, not to mention broadcast TV. With the advent of digital subchannels, there are dozens of broadcast networks and hundreds of TV stations looking for syndicated content. Almost anything you would want to watch is probably being shown somewhere or somehow.
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