At least tech companies aren't malicious about it. The big movie production companies lose original copies of older films pretty often and deliberately make watching their older content difficult and/or expensive.
If you're patient, lots of it eventually comes around on TCM. Unfortunately, the Comcast dvr doesn't let you just type in the names of movies to auto record, like Tivo could. It has to be on the current schedule, which only goes out 2 weeks.
