Owners of an about-to-expire copyright have several favorite arguments for extending it ... Another is that they need an extension as an incentive to convert old material into new media. As Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has pointed out, digitizing films is expensive. "Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?" he asks.
Obviously this man has never been on the net. If fans are happy to digitise crappo quality handicam versions of movies they're sure as hell going to happily convert the film if they could get thier hands on it. He's obviously never seen the fan sites where people have digitised their live recordings, braging about their multiple thousand dollar equipment they use to do it, gold cables only, digital cable this, DAT that. And no MP3s here, lossless compressiong, 30 Meg a file. Share and love.
Although he has a point... if these movie copyrights expire what's to stop the studios just throwing the film out? And I don't think Creative sell a film to DivX converter.
We'll likely end up with collections similar to the Cartoon Classics collections we're seeing here. Terrible quality but they're over 70 years old arn't they...