Ah, lots to think about. It is really hard to judge in these matters. It is my experience that you have to trust the site moderators to make wise decisions. I’d had to be privy to a great deal of information on both sides of this to have any idea if justice has been served, but I put my trust in Jay to make the right decisions and to weight the facts as he sees them.

A couple of side points to some comments in the preceding 11 pages:

The holy grail for A New Hope is not the original negative, but the 3 color separation master. I understand it had aged badly in that it had suffered some warping. In this day and age that is nothing significant, but back in 1997, that was a serious issue. These days they can do a digital restoration of a even warped 3 color separation and produce a flawless digital copy. It has been done so many times that I won’t bore you with examples you can pickup on blu-ray.

Who owns a film print? Well, legally the studio probably does. However, in the practical world of collecting, a studio’s right don’t even enter the picture. Possession dictates ownership and nothing else. Who owns a scan of such a print can be dicey. Is it the owner of the print, the owner of the print at the time of the scan, or the person who paid for the scan and is in possession of the scan? Opinions will differ and if someone feels ownership of all scans of a print they own it is really hard to argue with that. I agree that the best course is for a new scan to be made where the owner of the print knows who has the scan and what the intended use is.

What saddens me is that this has happened before the TESB scan was released. But as of right now, a scan of the full Original Trilogy is in the wild, so I am partially satisfied.