The article is so wrong that I do not know where to start.
First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing.
OTOH, copyright is still a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe, so fans tend to digitize and share more often.
Compare rutracker to the pirate bay. Even in its heyday TPB did not have the level of commitment of the community that rutracker consistently exhibits for 18 years already.
P.S. Here is the Lighthouse (2006) refered in the first paragraphs in FHD quality [1]. Enjoy.
> First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing.
This is completely inaccurate. There is big money in storing original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things. The copyright remains with the studio, but the actual print is stored in a warehouse.
The bigger issue is the opposite -- because of real estate prices, the warehouses keep moving, and sometimes they sell off part of their collection to another warehouse. The owners of the films have no idea where their originals are. When I worked at Netflix we would often have the problem where a studio sold us the rights to stream something, so we would ask for the original print to digitize it, and it would take months to track down which warehouse actually had the original print. But once found it was easy to digitize because it was usually in really good shape.
Eastern Europe doesn't have the film economy to support such warehouses.
> There is big money in storing original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things.
Until the studio decides to, you know, just destroy them or they are destroyed by fires
In addition to the ruined “King Kong” attraction and the burned New York street scapes, the Universal Studios Hollywood fire has claimed another casualty: perhaps hundreds of classic 35-millimeter film prints, the studio said Tuesday.
The fire also claimed about 5% of Universal Music Group’s recordings...
In an e-mail sent to several dozen film exhibitors Monday, Universal said the “fire destroyed nearly 100% of the archive prints kept here on the lot.
First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing.
OTOH, copyright is still a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe, so fans tend to digitize and share more often.
Compare rutracker to the pirate bay. Even in its heyday TPB did not have the level of commitment of the community that rutracker consistently exhibits for 18 years already.
P.S. Here is the Lighthouse (2006) refered in the first paragraphs in FHD quality [1]. Enjoy.
[1] https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5979083