Archivist Rick Prelinger sez,
The world's largest repository of public domain film and video has signed a distribution deal with Amazon's CustomFlix subsidiary to sell DVDs of its holdings.
This isn't another Smithsonian-Showtime debacle. It's a nonexclusive deal, and the Archives gets copies of digitized materials and can make them available to its users. I've got a FOIA request in for the partnership agreement.
Every generation needs to reinterpret history in the light of its own experience, and hopefully this deal will make it just a bit easier for people to get a look at the motherlode that until now has mostly sat on archival shelves.
(Thanks, Rick!)
