We recently encountered a situation where (brought to mind by recent political events) my wife wanted to watch Bob Roberts[0], an obscure "mockumentary" about a

We recently encountered a situation where (brought to mind by recent political events) my wife wanted to watch Bob Roberts[0], an obscure "mockumentary" about an outrageous wealthy political candidate. I'd never heard of it. She asked around, and almost none of her friends had either. She was so insistent regarding its relevance that we set up a viewing party to see it. Being naive, we both assumed it could be streamed... somewhere. We haven't used those plastic discs in a while either, but we figured we would not need them. We didn't know whether Netflix would have it, but we figured somebody would take our money so we could see it. Nobody. Nowhere. It was completely unavailable. I figured that the rights were tied up to keep those physical discs moving from shelves. I thought I'd run to the nearest big box store and pick it up. I went to their web site to see if they had it. Nope. Not there. I mean, I suppose you can imagine how my story ends: I go to a shady looking site where I can find this particular movie for free and have it saved on my hard drive with no restrictions. Just as I was becoming annoyed with the future, I was reminded of how senseless this problem is. It was a good movie, and it was good that our friends could enjoy it. But it's easy to imagine a future where it disappears forever, for everybody. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Roberts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Roberts