https://www.si.com/vault/1966/03/07/607662/really-the-greatest Very interesting article on "Jimmy" Jacobs. Much of it focuses on his dominance as the greatest handball player of all time but it also discusses his fight collection (mostly toward the end). I thought this was an interesting and surprising passage regarding his low regard for pre-WWI fighters: D'Amato and Jacobs first met in 1960 because of their mutual interest in boxing. D'Amato had long contended that most oldtime fighters of the pre-World War I era were bums, and Jacobs agreed. Nowadays, the two of them often spend hours shaking their heads over the likes of Stanley Ketchel and Philadelphia Jack O'Brien, and Jacobs occasionally irritates oldtime fans by noting the inadequacies of their heroes in articles he writes for The Ring Magazine. "I have seen every fighter from Corbett to Clay under the Marquess of Queensberry Rules," he says, "and when some guy 93 years old tells me he also has seen Corbett and Clay the difference is that I don't have to use my memory to go back 69 years. I'm talking about fighters I saw on the screen last night." My apologies if this stuff is already well-known and/or has already been covered at length in this forum.
Yes, Jacobs was the one who famously started hosting viewing parties showing fight films of guys like Corbett to boxing writers and top-rated boxers in the late 1960s without telling them who the fighters were beforehand. And after everyone was finished laughing at the people on the screen, he'd tell them that was Jim Corbett (or whomever). And people couldn't believe it, because they'd been told for years what "masters" those guys were. And, on film, they often looked pretty bad. What I find interesting is that Jacobs would find someone with an old film, like the guy with the copy of Corbett-Fitz, and he'd buy the film, make a copy, and say he owned the rights to Corbett-Fitz. And then networks would pay Jacobs and Cayton to show Corbett-Fitz, when all Jacobs did was buy a copy of the fight off an old guy who'd once purchased a copy himself. It makes you wonder who really "owns" the rights to a lot of those old films.
Jacobs would be turning in his grave if he knew that just about anyone now can get access to films like Corbett/Fitz on the net.
Who here hasn't personally felt the effect that quality enhancement has on the perceptions of the subjects abilities?
Thank God that footage is now in the hands of people who can actually do something with it. The cycle of life. He did gods work collecting all that footage though.
Kind of doubt it would have made all that much of a difference. People who are inclined to worship older fighters did so just fine without stabilized footage; people who disapprove of their technique and form can do so even with stabilized footage.
Its pretty cut and dry actually. In regards to not being able to stabilize the old films: thats not true. The old films look the way the look and jump the way they jump because of age and damage. 100 yrs ago most of them, barring exceptions such as Jeffries-Ruhlin which was always bad, ran steady, at normal speed, were clearer, and didnt jump around in the aperture.
The only way he could claim that is if he dramatically changed the actual films themselves, which he didnt do. Simply adding sound and titles wouldnt reach that standard. His copyright would only apply to his sound and titles. Although this is in fact what Jacobs attempted to do and often successfully scared people into believing.
Great post, thank you for the clarification. Do you have any idea when Jacobs would have made most of his copies? If Jacobs was showing Cus a copy of the original Fitz-Corbett, I wonder how close that is to what is in public domain.
Fitz-Corbett is in the public domain. Nothing Jacobs did could have changed that. Those guys had most people believing they owned copyrights to that stuff but they didnt, not legitimate ones anyway. Just purchasing a film or a print of a film doesnt entitle you to claim ownership of it anymore than buying a copy of a DVD does. If I buy a copy of Star Wars and add a new soundtrack to ut and then file copyright on it it doesnt mean I now own the original film. Another trick they used to pull was to get fighters who requested footage of themselves to sign a release stating that the fighter in question understood that they (the fighter) had no rights to the film and that they "understood" that the rights rested solely with Jacobs and Cayton. This is a nice trick and Im sure if it went to court they would have trotted out these letters to say "see judge, even the fighter knew we owned the copyright" but this isnt valid either. First, very few fighters retained any right to films, very very very few. Signing away their rights is exactly how they got paid when those films were first shown to begin with. Second, simply filing a phoney derivitive copyright and then trotting out some letter from a fighter does not constitute proof of a copyright. You would have to show a clear chain of custody so to speak showing that the rights transferred from the originator, to this guy, then to that guy, and finally to Cayton and Jacobs. I know for a fact they couldnt do this with the lions share of those older fights. For example any claim that Jacobs and Cayton made on any of the IBC fights is a bold faced lie (and think about just how many fights that is considering the IBC had a monopoly on the 1950s). I know this because two friends of mine had taken written and taped testimony from Truman Gibson, the legal mind behind the IBC, where he stated that the IBC never sold any rights to any of those films to anyone period. Furthermore, I know for a fact that a great many of the older fights post 1923 have expired copyrights due to the fact that their original owner never renewed them. You used to have to physically renew your copyrights and none of these guys ever had any reasonable expectation of showing these things again before the rise in popularity of tv so they just let them go. Finally, as someone else mentioned, all films prior to 1923 are now public domain. Cayton and Jacobs filed derivitive copyrights on these films (even some they didnt physically have in the hope that they would eventually find them and market them) but that copyright is only valid on the parts that Jacobs and Cayton created i.e. the sound effects, voiceover narration, titles, etc. Most of the copyrights were filed under Bill Cayton first and later Turn of the Century Fights and BigFights.
Hi Klompton I was always curious about those 50s fights. You see some that are kinescopes of the actual television broadcasts. This content is protected And you see some of the same fights that appeared on shows like Rocky Marciano's where they look like they were shot on film from a single angle and the sound and voice were added later. This content is protected I can imagine that Jacobs and Cayton own the rights to the film they shot and narrated, since they filmed them and added the voice and sound. But I'm sure Gibson is correct that they never sold the broadcast rights of the Kinescopes. But the live broadcasts are the ones I prefer to watch and I've always wondered if anyone still owns those. Particularly those fights shown on networks that don't even exist anymore (like DuPont). Have you come across any info on kinescopes and the rights to those? Just wondering. Thanks.
