The article isn't about copyright. It's about a change in distribution and access rights to Fox's back catalogue of movies since Disney bought Fox which is harming smaller cinema house operators.
> so copyright is a root cause even if it isn't the root cause.
That assertion makes absolutely no sense. Fifty years isn't a huge amount of time and the bulk of Fox's catalogue (that's actually interesting, well for me anyway) is younger than that so your copyright argument doesn't stand up.
To re-iterate, this article is about restricting access to cinemas to play these movies in their theatres. The distribution format for cinemas and their equipment is, as far as I know, somewhat different from buying a DVD or BluRay off of Amazon. Even a ten year copyright period wouldn't solve the problem of the studios withholding the technical formats that are needed for their content to be played in a theatre. They simply don't have to give that up.
Personally I don't have a problem with studios owning the copyright for say 75 years, that seems like a fair amount of time...provided the studio's play fair with access to their content.
Sure what Disney are doing is a shitty thing, but it's certainly not as simple as claiming that reforming the copyright rules would solve this.
Also, just because copyright is up, one still needs physical access to the media to copy it. I'm not sure how that is (or should be) handled with film.
