I was editor in chief of a multimedia website in the late 90’s. We bought public domain content from a dealer and had to trust that what they offered was really in the PD. (Tracking it down definitively is often very difficult and expensive.) From them we bought Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and put it up, until we heard from the Chaplin estate’s lawyers. Turns out it had been in the PD at one point, but Congress passed some law that put it back under copyright again.
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We all have Sonny Bono and Darth Mickey to thank for that bullbutter.
SMH.
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I don’t really think this rates its own thread. But I’d like to propose that the real reason we briefly got the Kaiju movies in one collection is that the film creators secretly wanted their own good-quality copies for posterity. But they couldn’t publicly admit that. So once they sent proxies out to purchase them, the rights went bye-bye again. 
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I know there are bigger priorities for the Gizmoplex, but has there been any update on adding episodes currently not available for streaming?
I’m specifically talking about the episodes Shout! released in the past in which they had the rights, save Godzilla vs. Megalon for which they didn’t and The Final Sacrifice which the director is trying to bury.
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Streaming rights and home media rights are two separate things. And both usually have fixed term contracts. I’m sure Shout! is trying to get both sets of rights for every episode they can.
There are a few others than The Final Sacrifice where the current rights owner is trying to bury the movie or is trying to get a licensing rate that’s completely unreasonable.
Shout! ended up buying the rights to most of Roger Corman’s catalog to make their lives easier, as well as doing a bunch of behind the scenes license wrangling to get the Gamera movies back a few years ago.
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I don’t have any answer to updates on this issue, but all I’ll say is that Shout Factory worked the streaming rights to Quest of the Delta Knights at a time when no one thought such a thing was possible, and THAT’S considerable.
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I don’t see it mentioned anywhere in this thread so I’m just going to put it here. Three episodes that were available on DVD and not on the Gizmoplex now are. I don’t know when this happened or what exactly happened to renew / secure these rights. For all I know they were just forgotten somehow and finally made it to the service.
Oddly one of them was the most discussed as the numbering of the box set was problematic in the forums.
0305 Stranded In Space — XXXVI
0317 Viking Women and the Sea Serpent — XXXIV
1010 It Lives By Night — X X X
By my count, excluding KTMA episodes, that leaves a total of 31 episodes not on the Gizmoplex.
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This is the movie we’ll never see again for a long while.
Vimeo? GONE.
YouTube? GONE.
Even DailyMotion? POOF. Gone like the wind.
I think the director just… doesn’t want us to watch/riff it at all.
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The Final Sacrifice is still available in 2 parts here https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5g3ahg and
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5g3ane - download, stitch together and keep for posterity (or until Tjardus has a change of heart).
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Wait. I thought it was taken down from DM, and now it’s back?! That… THAT’S AMAZING!!!
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Interesting… Stranded in Space is an episode I have never seen. Good to know.
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We call that the BaskinRobbin box set.
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I wish we could get Agent From H.A.R.M. in the gizmoplex.
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Oh dear. The entire structure would need to be smarm-proofed before that could ever happen.
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I had to pull out my Shout Factory Box Set recently for that one.
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For whatever reason, those 3 episodes were still available to buy on Rifftrax’s site. I think someone here brought that to the attention of the MST3K folks and shortly afterwards they became available in the Gizmoplex.
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I had to do a lot of fancy maneuvering to acquire all of those episodes and the fact that many of them have Comedy Central or SciFi Channel logos in the corner and VHS tracking lines makes me smile.
The tapes are still circulating. 
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I bought those 3 episodes recently from the Gizmoplex.
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I got the Shout Factory set a couple of years ago on ebay because The Final Sacrifice is my episode ever. Glad to see DM still has it.
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I got lucky enough to buy this one. Still have it! (Amazing Colossal Man, that is)
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