IP Democracy: Amazon to Sell National Archives Videos

In a move that seems like a great model of public and private cooperation, the National Archives and Amazon.com have reached a pact under which Amazon will sell films and video footage gathering dust in the archives’ vaults. These videos and films, which capture some of our most intriguing and important moments in history, are already available at no charge to folks who want to visit the archives’ facilities in College Park, MD, but now they’ll become available to anybody via the Internet. And the government has a back-up preservationist for cost-to-maintain material.

Amazon will make these videos available on a custom-order basis through a subsidiary called CustomFlix. Selected portions of the Archives’ footage, newsreels from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, are already for sale at Amazon for $19.99 each.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on July 31, 2007 9:31 AM to IP Democracy