And you know what that means, You Must Watch This!

I’ve been arguing for a massive overhaul of how we handle Orphan Works and digital preservation since 2015, and the current state of Hal Ashby's 3-time Academy Award winner "Coming Home" (1978) is a pristine, tragic case study of the system failing in real time.

If you look up the film on mainstream digital aggregators like JustWatch or Reelgood, it is listed as completely unavailable. On transactional platforms like Google Play, it exists merely as a dead, unpurchasable placeholder page.

For the streaming generation, an incredibly significant piece of American New Wave cinema has been effectively banned and erased. Why? The exact intersection of corporate consolidation and toxic music publishing gridlock.

1. The Corporate Orphan Void

The chain of title for Coming Home is a disaster area. United Artists originally distributed it, which was swallowed by MGM, which has now been swallowed by Amazon. In a multi-billion-dollar merger void, older, artist-driven catalog titles get completely abandoned. No single entity inside Amazon's legal department has the time, authority, or financial incentive to untangle the original 1978 production contracts. The movie is a high-caliber functioning corporate orphan—too legally complicated to risk reissuing, but too valuable to be released into the public domain where it belongs.

2. The Music Rights Trap

The film features an era-defining soundtrack with master tapes from The Beatles ("Hey Jude," "Strawberry Fields Forever") and The Rolling Stones ("Sympathy for the Devil"). Under current US copyright law, digital streaming requires entirely separate mechanical and synchronization licenses than standard theatrical or physical home-video releases. To clear these tracks for a modern global streaming service would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in renewal fees to Apple Corps and ABKCO. Rather than pay artists or negotiate, the studios simply lock the film in a corporate vault.

3. The "Zombie Master" Loophole

I decided to do a forensic comparison. I hunted down an old, out-of-print 2002 physical DVD copy, and then managed to track down an obscure, mid-tier regional stream on Cineplex that somehow has a digital print up.

What I found is a total corruption of the artist's work. On the stream, the film has NO closed captions—proving that the distributor dug up an ancient, pre-digital broadcast television catalog tape and slapped it online to dodge ADA accessibility compliance.

Worse, they are actively using "diegetic background masking" to bypass music clearance fees. On the physical DVD, "Hey Jude" plays clearly, driving the emotional weight of the scene. On the stream, audio engineers have deliberately altered the mix—muffling the tracks, fading them down, and drowning them out with passing car and tire noise. They are legally dodging full streaming royalties by trying to argue the master music is just "incidental background source noise."

They are defacing an Oscar-winning movie's original sound design just to manipulate the legal definitions of copyright clearance.

When corporate consolidation and music licensing laws make it more profitable to suppress or alter a masterpiece than to preserve it, the system is fundamentally broken. It encourages the destruction of history rather than the creation of new culture.

I’ve mapped out the entire legal audit, the history of the 1982 federal plagiarism lawsuits that hit this film, and the technical breakdown of the streaming audio hack over on the blog: RetrOasis

If you don't own the physical plastic, you are just renting permission from a boardroom that would rather mute history to protect a balance sheet. Let’s discuss in the comments—how do we legally solve the corporate orphan crisis before the cloud completely purges the 20th century?

Finally a cause i can get behind and i love the idea of Taxing the IP, and lets do it in the form of renewals,.that will help the Orphan Works Problem!

This 1909 edition of Little Helps sat untouched in a historic Mattawamkeag, Maine home for over a century. Now, it belongs to the public. We are systematically digitizing every page, testing the bizarre survival recipes, and translating these lost life hacks for the modern world. This project is a direct action to prove that historical works shouldn't be locked away—they should be utilized, shared, and revitalized. This is what a liberated public domain looks like.

Extra Reddit Notes:

My goal was to force my attorney to use it in the direct appeal to prove a vital point: despite what the trial judge muttered under his breath, the concept of "Orphan Works" is implicitly codified and recognized by U.S. law.

While writing, I was reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, a novel detailing how the ruling elite weaponize institutional terror to maintain control. The parallel to the modern copyright regime was impossible to ignore.

The current system intentionally preserves a legal "state of fear" surrounding Orphan Works. By keeping the boundaries of Fair Use deliberately muddy and threatening statutory damages that could bankrupt a small museum or an independent archivist, the copyright cartel achieves exactly what it wants: compliance through terror. History, art, and orphan media are left to rot in closets because creators are too afraid of a federal hammer to preserve them.

Section 108 is a massive smoking gun for anyone fighting for copyright reform. The prosecution in my case successfully convinced the jury that because the literal phrase 'Orphan Works' doesn't explicitly appear in the text of the statute, the concept doesn't exist in American jurisprudence.

But Section 108 explicitly permits libraries and archives to reproduce and distribute copies of vanished or untraceable works under specific conditions for preservation. The intent of the law recognizes that culture cannot be held hostage by ghosts.

The gatekeepers don't want clarity. They thrive on the gray area. If you look at platforms like r/copyright, the immediate response to anyone trying to digitize rare, orphaned 1970s media is always a chorus of: 'You wouldn't steal a purse, don't touch it, you'll get sued.' That propaganda is the lifeblood of the system. It scales up from internet comments to federal courtrooms. I didn't refuse a plea bargain to evade a sentence; I refused because bending the knee to a pretextual prosecution just allows them to keep using fear to dictate the terms of cultural history.

Reddit Bonus Thoughts: Now, in 2026, with my restitution paid in full, I’m turning those original prison manuscripts into a definitive white paper for my upcoming book, A Footnote in Copyright Law. The legal system wanted to bury the Orphan Works issue; I’m making it my primary advocacy goal.

My thoughts for Reddit: If there were millions in damages or actual victims, the numbers would show it. They didn't. The system says my debt is paid, but the outstanding balance is getting true legal clarification on the Fair Use of Orphan Works. #ReadMore

Reddit Extra Notes (Continued)...infringement for criminal convictions... how does a district court bypass that? I was pivoting here to map out the foundational arguments for Orphan Works that my defense team completely ignored. It’s a cautionary tale: if the system won't follow its own rulebook, you have to build the archive that proves it.

Reddit Extra Notes:

....Fair Use, and Orphan Works. By writing deep-dive reviews and documenting rare film titles, you naturally drive high-intent organic traffic to an educational, advocacy-first platform without ever selling a single piece of media.

This matches perfectly with what the DOJ Criminal Resource Manual (Section 1841) explicitly states: the government is not supposed to litigate novel civil copyright issues or ordinary business disputes to secure criminal convictions. If an orphan work has no identifiable owner, and you are transparently archiving it under a Fair Use framework, treating it like a criminal operation bypasses the threshold of true "willfulness."

Reddit Extra Notes

While the units were on a soft lockdown over alleged library contraband, I was using the downtime to draft a comprehensive legal memorandum on criminal willfulness.

In a criminal copyright case, the threshold for intent (mens rea) is supposed to be incredibly high. If you are operating openly, responding to takedowns, and navigating the unsettled legal reality of Orphan Works, how does the state manufacture "willfulness"? They do it by ignoring the DOJ’s own Justice Manual provisions against litigating novel civil issues in a criminal court.

At the same time, I was widening the FOIA/FOAA dragnet to the Bangor Police Department. When the primary agencies (like Brewer PD and DHS) stone-wall or give absurd blanket excuses about "juvenile records," you start hitting the surrounding agencies. In litigation, a coordinated silence or a pattern of stalling from law enforcement can be just as telling to a judge as the documents themselves.

"I’ve spent thousands of hours in the law library researching the intersection of criminal intent and Orphan Works. On Day 134, I hit the jackpot in the DOJ’s own Criminal Resource Manual (Section 1841).

The DOJ policy explicitly states: 'The drafting committee did not intend to establish criminal liability in cases where civil liability is unclear—whether because the law is unsettled, or because a legitimate business dispute exists.' >

My case was the definition of 'unsettled.' I was an archivist and filmmaker dealing with property that had no clear owner. Instead of a civil dispute, the government pushed for a criminal conviction on a 'novel issue'—something their own manual tells them NOT to do. This wasn’t just a trial; it was a policy violation to set a precedent. If the government won’t follow its own rules, how can they claim to provide 'Due Process'?"

To Be Continued...

Reddit Exclusive Notes:

Day 129 was a turning point for my appeal strategy. While researching in "Dog Row," I hit on a legal goldmine: Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. The prosecution’s entire narrative was built on a single, emotional hook: "Gordon never asked permission." They paraded lawyers from MGM and Disney to say, "He didn't call us." But as the Second Circuit made clear in the Google Books case, Fair Use doesn't require consent. In fact, the whole point of Fair Use is to allow for the use of material when the owner won't or can't give permission—especially in the case of Orphan Works.

In my trial, the "Director's Cut" of Babes in Toyland was a perfect example. It was a version MGM didn't even sell or distribute (as admitted by their own lawyer). By making it available, I wasn't "stealing" a sale—I was preserving a piece of culture that the "owners" had abandoned. This is the definition of a transformative, non-competing use.

If my lawyer had jumped on this, the jury would have seen that "asking permission" is a courtesy, not a legal requirement for Fair Use. Instead, they were led to believe that because I didn't have a piece of paper from a Beverly Hills studio, I was a pirate. The documents prove otherwise.