More fallout from the Supremes’ terrible ruling on copyright law: Mystery Science Theater 3000 had been counting on the flims that it lampooned entering the public domain before its limited-time licenses expired. Now it looks like a bunch of MST3K episodes won’t ever get re-released.
The rights to the films featured in most MST3K episodes were purchased for only a few years and, in the majority of cases, those rights have expired, and will have to be renewed before the episodes can be shown on TV or released on video and DVD. In quite many cases the rights owners have set prices prohibitively high; in a few cases they are apparently doing so to suppress the episodes in which their property was ridiculed.
If the Court had overturned the copyright extension, an undetermined number of films featured in MST3K episodes might have gained “public domain” status, markedly lowering the price TV networks or video distributors would have had to pay to make those episodes available.
Link (scroll down about half-way)
(Thanks, Ren!)