Copyright term, film labeling, and film preservation legislation : hearings before the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, first session, on H.R. 989, H.R. 1248, and H.R. 1734 ... June 1 and July 13, 1995 (1996)

Record Details:

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538 Los Angeles Hearing 55 system of checks and balances. At MGM as with most owners, we actively sell our movies. What we deliver to our clients must be acceptable quality, which is often subjective and a rather changing concept. The acceptability of a negative or videotape or magnetic sound track is governed by things such as changing technology and the quality of the source material that we're dealing with. At MGM we found that what was being accepted on videotape five years ago is not being accepted today. Foreign distributors are demanding product of the highest quality now and with the advent of digital tape, we have been faced with the job of remastering our entire Ubrary, which we embarked upon approximately two years ago based on sales of our entire Ubraiy to certain foreign countries. These contracts have led us to the decision to remaster this b"brary and our reasoning was twofold. First, we needed to satisfy the iimnediate need of delivering to our clients. Secondly, we wanted to prepare our film elements for future technological changes such as high def, as well as preservation. Once we undertook the project of this sort, you have to take a hard look at your film elements. They must be good to start with if your end product is to also be good. And as we embarked on our remastering, whatever that may be, we were forced to do this. This exercise obviously leads us to some far and strange worlds but it's also a very worthy exercise. We've had the opportunity to take a look at a very large Ubrary. We have approximately fifteen hundred titles encompassing United Artists, Caimon and some smaller libraries. If we find an element has problems when we're looking at it for video remastering, we will fix that problem at the time and, if it's unfixable, we will replace it. That's one thing that we've been very adamant about and mainly because, obviousfy, we're interested in protecting the film itself. But abo if it doesn't get accepted by our clients, we don't get paid. So it's a rather effective kick in the butt, if you will, to make sure that that's taken care of. Our elements are separated for protection purposes with material on the West Coast, the East Coast and London. If we move something we confirm where other material is and then we return it to a different place. The upkeep of this tibrary is obviously an uphill battle for us but we're constantly faced with it» No amount of vigilance can stop aging but help is always welcome. Organizations like the Library of Congress and the archives we have consulted with and used often to both of our benefits. We would welcome any form of assistance in tltcsoaintenance of these libraries u long as the ultimate responsibility lies with the owners oi these libraries. « Briefly, some projects that we have in progress right now are television shows that we have that were