This is the craziest thing about copyright law. Maybe it's fair that an author and his family should receive compensation for their work even after their deaths.

But Sunrise was released 95 years ago - the odds are that there is nobody alive who worked on this movie, nobody alive that even saw it in theaters. Why is it not publicly available? I doubt anyone is earning significant money off of an extremely old movie that caters to a niche audience - if the media is so old that it is both literally and aesthetically irrelevant in society, it's astounding that it wouldn't have been in the public domain already. It's a massive shame that Disney's corporate plots have been a detriment to other media that isn't generating huge profits. I only wish that "Steamboat Willie" going into the public domain will bring about some sort of copyright reform.