Amazon is under fire for cutting out an important scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, a favorite Christmas story since it opened in 1946. Amazon shortened it to an hour and lost most of the impact.
The hit film follows the life of businessman and banker George Bailey. Amazon dropped the Pottersville scene where George wishes he had never been born. His guardian angel steps in to remind him he needs to earn his “angel wings.” The angel, Clarence, shows George all he has done with his life. His town would have been run down, with people out of work, his wife a spinster, and his children never born. His many good deeds led to wonderful accomplishments.
George realizes he has a wonderful life and no longer thinks he’d be better off dead. It was the point of the film, and they took it out.
Copyright Problem?
Jonathan Turley said they might consider the film too dark, or it could be an ongoing copyright issue. Amazon still offers the full movie as an alternative.
The film is in the public domain because Republic Film (which purchased the rights after RKO sold it to Liberty Films, which was then taken over by Paramount) failed to renew its copyright in 1974. It was an apparent glitch.
There is a dispute that goes back to the original short story by Philip Van Doren Stern, who penned the short story The Greatest Gift. While the film itself has a lapsed copyright, Stern renewed his copyright in 1971 for an additional 28 years (Congress then extended expiration dates under the Copyright Act of 1976 until 2038).
Turley believes the copyrights shouldn’t go on endlessly, but Congress partners in these extensions.
This is the scene where none of his good deeds are accomplished, and the angel has him live through the results. They cut the fantasy out of the fantasy drama.
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They need to pass a law that makes whoever put an official emblem on real an original video’s and digital content. Instead of using technology for the better they choose to use it for politics, for profits, to deceive. Original content must be protected, and verified with no biased censoring or editing, It is senseless destruction of property and of knowledge on all fronts.
Things have gotten way out of hand in what’s supposed to be a public service used by the citizens for obtaining knowledge, communication, commerce, and for reference purposes.
What’s occurring today is literally the same as the historic destruction of the Library of Alexandria, being maliciously and ignorantly burned to the ground, they’ve speculated that maneuver only set back the advancement of humanities knowledge by centuries. All in the name of politics.
Only hope is that people rise up and fight back, like some have begun to do, because most people have been hopelessly stuck in the analogy of Plato’s cave, when comes to being aware of what’s actually taking place around them,
copyrights are completely out of control. They should be limited to 50 years, only to the person who created it and not transferable. The way the laws stand today, the honeymooners will still be under copyright in the year 10000.
Your correct that copy rights should expire, now days the powers that be will and have bought up the copy rights only for the right’s to censor or destroy the content. That should be made to be an illegal action, and prohibited.
Censorship is not always done with malicious intentions, but using today’s technological advancements, algorithms to alter pretty much all digital content, censorship on a ubiquitous scale. and using contextomy of digital content to distort reality, technology being used for political purposes, is technology being used maliciously on the population in the form of psychological terrorism.
Here’s the catch, it’s going to happen in one form or another, one faction or another is going to take control by force, it will be friend or foe that control the narrative engineering in the future at this point, we’ve reached a cross roads with technological advancements and controlling the flow of information, the best we can hope for at this point in time is that it’s friend that emerges as the winner in the censorship wars.
The average person cannot comprehend how many ways they’re being manipulated in, and that the content that they’re generally being exposed to has been adulterated and twisted in a multitude of divisive ways.
It’s not what people are exposed to, but that they’re being forcefully exposed to artificially manipulated content, and are being intentionally coerced by others into being misled, they’ve been led to believe that the content is real; when in fact it is NOT!. That is the core problem.
And copy rights should be non transferable, that’s one of many thing’s that has ruined the music industry. Commercialization. The boys up stairs just don’t understand anymore.
Related, and for what this is worth,
The Movie ” Guarding Tess” with Sherley McClaine and Nicholas Cage has a different ending in Canada and in the USA.
In the USA version she dies at the end, in the Canadian version she does not die.