His Girl Friday and copyright

Here's an interesting post by our text authors on their film studies blog about His Girl Friday and the way its lack of copyright protection allowed early film scholars access to it.

There is also a response to it here on Jason Mittell's blog. Jason argues that the word "piracy" is not really appropriate since no laws were apparently broken. He also reinforces the idea that
"the film’s lack of scarcity has made it worth enough to pony up for a
high-quality authorized copy."
I would quibble that it seems to have been that and an apparent collective agreement that it is an excellent film. I add this because there are certainly lots of satisfactory and/or mediocre films that would be unlikely to become lauded classics even if they were freely circulated on Bittorrent. But for those films by which a contemporary audience would be engaged, access to them via the public domain does seem to increase their social and cultural value over time.