They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else..
That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial sense.
This sounds like regulatory failure creating a deadweight loss. IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong.
> IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong
They definitely further the creation, as we can't see the old stuff! I find music to be particularly bad here. People on Youtube can clip videos with fair use and talk over them, but any audio with music in needs to be muted, even if it's part of the fair use, because music is enforced so stringently.
If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, but didn't have veto over publication, how bad would that be? The reasons people usually justify copyright protection usually centre on rewarding the creators, and I think the right to stop people seeing your work is a harder sell.
There is of course a new question of how to set the price, but you could e.g. have an auction of some kind where the highest bid must be accepted.
(There are certainly notable cases like Mein Kampf where copyright has been conspicuously used to prevent further distribution.)
> If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, [...]
How much would they get paid? What if they wanted to hold out for more? Would every piece of copyrighted material be paid the same? Or would you normalise it per sentence or per letter? Or per frame in a movie?
Also to a first approximation we can treat all music as roughly interchangeable and we can measure the 'amount' of music eg by runtime or by song, so compulsory licensing can set some arbitrary fees.
You can perhaps do something similar for video, but it's hard to do that for all copyrighted material. Eg for a video game a single sprite has a very different value than some modules in the game's engine.
I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain.
I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options.
The normalization can be the same as licensing is done now, "per work", negotiating specific usages needn't change, except that the seller has to allow that each covered work be subject to at least one must-sell auction per e.g. year. They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.
Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.
Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.
You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.
Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)
There is some system like this for music in Austria. I may record a new version of your song but it entitles you to a writers credit and some guaranteed amount of all revenue.
But is this content available somewhere else then? Should it not have been archived then or given to those who hold those rights so they could publish?
That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial sense.