OK, well feel free to notify me when LFL shuts down Adywan, Harmy and the rest of the fan editors on OT.com for all of that law breaking they've done for the past 10-15 years.
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren't trying to claim that what these guys do isn't a clear-cut violation of copyright law. I suspect you know it is because, y'know, that's what the law says. Likewise, I doubt you'd claim "I'm not speeding" if you were driving 70mph in a 55mph zone, because that's really the kind of statement that "It's not copyright violation" is in this case. Now, maybe you want to argue about the morality of it, or maybe your attitude is that you don't care that it's against the law. And hey, that's your call. But there's basically no argument
under the law as to why these guys ought to be able to keep distributing their stuff, because the law explicitly prohibits their actions just like the sign explicitly says "55mph speed limit."
The fact that Disney (and LFL before it) didn't enforce yet doesn't change the fact that it's still a copyright law violation. At best, these guys could argue that Disney knew and therefore they can't be punished for what they did
previously (which is a shaky argument as it is, because then they'd have to prove Disney was aware of their actions). But nothing would protect them from Disney, say, getting an injunction to prevent
future distribution, if Disney cared to.
They just don't seem to care right now. But that doesn't change the fact that they're basically driving 70 in a 55 zone. It just means that nobody's enforcing the speed limit...yet.
At the risk of distracting from the discussion of ephemera, I'm curious about something technical... When doing the Special Editions, George said that the original negative had been destroyed by the process of scanning/digitizing it for restoration, augmentation, and other SE fiddling. Does this just mean the reel was sliced up into individual frames that were then scanned? Or that the entirety of it, already fragile, was rendered useless in the transfer? Also, whether this holds for ESB and ROTJ.
My big concern is that, since George the technology guy somehow didn't predict higher resolutions, the Special Editions and Prequels aren't in 4K resolution or higher. The Prequels can never be, because they were shot digitally to their native resolution and that's it. But if even the individual frames from the OOT negatives still exist, there's some hope for higher-resolution transfers, and I don't want to let go of that hope unless I have to.
--Jonah
That's about the only hope for an OOT release that anyone has. George's statement might be true about the very specific copy of the original negative to which he was referring. Like, the very first negative to be made, that might be totally trashed. But that doesn't mean there aren't other negatives that are just as or almost as good, and wouldn't be perfectly useable IF someone wanted to make a new transfer at higher resolutions. As with the PT stuff, the SE additions were done in 1080p HD. Which means...that's it. That's as much resolution as anyone's ever gonna get from those images natively. Any upscaling would involve mathematical equations to basically guess at what's between those pixels, and wouldn't look as "real" as a scan from another film negative.
So, the theory is this:
- Disney will inevitably want to reissue the old films if and when the technology gets to a point where 1080p is no longer the consumer level standard, and something like 4K or above is.
- Disney will need to rescan some old copy of the film to do that, which means it won't be the Lowry Digital transfer, which also means it won't be the SE version.
- If Disney wants to add back the SE things, it'll need to do so from the ground up.
- Either Disney will say "Meh, screw it. Not worth the money to do SEs" and release the OOT, or they'll say "Meh, might as well scan and correct this stuff, and then release it on its own before we release the SEs."
And that's about the only angle where an OOT gets released. All of that requires the other stuff we've discussed to happen: recapturing the rights from Fox and/or working a deal with Fox for ANH, consumers adopting display technology that leads Disney to want to do this at all, probably that broadband connections grow exponentially in speed and remain affordable for consumers, etc.
In short, there are a bunch of dominoes that have to fall before Disney even gets round to
considering whether to release the OOT. It could still happen, but there's a lot that needs to happen first, and then Disney needs to see a profit in it. And none of that will happen pre-2020. So, in the meantime, your options are the existing blu-rays, or copyright infringement.
