But even if so, can those few not sufficiently monetize things to warrant the storage and delivery costs? I mean, yeah, old movies once had their original film melted down, but for the past 80 years they've at least thrown it into a vault or similar. Physical storage is orders of magnitudes more expensive than digital; even just dropping these things into an S3 bucket and serving them as needed for .10 cents would cost less than what they used to do, -and- would allow them to actually make money from it (albeit very little).
If you don't want -any- of that, then why not release it for free and allow things like the internet archive to store it and deliver it for you? It's worth the money to store it -in case- you want to do something with it, but not worth the money to actually do something with it, even though that costs no more and has a return on investment?
If you don't want -any- of that, then why not release it for free and allow things like the internet archive to store it and deliver it for you? It's worth the money to store it -in case- you want to do something with it, but not worth the money to actually do something with it, even though that costs no more and has a return on investment?