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I think it's slightly less complicated than this. NBC definitely owns whatever copyright may still exist in the material; WRC was an owned-and-operated NBC station and the O&O stations' material is owned by the network. The Eisenhower Library is a repository only, and has no rights interest at all, just because they have a copy (any more than they would have some rights interest if they have a copy of "Citizen Kane" in their collection.) NBC News most likely employs this policy because they don't have the resources to deal with private individuals seeking material--think of all the people who've ever been on television, or think they were, in the days before VCRs. This blanket policy keeps them from having to deal with these requests on which they will make no money whatsoever. The other factor is releasing material to people who have no vested interest in keeping it from being copied. Producers sign contracts limiting the use of the footage and can be sued if they misuse it; individuals would in theory be able to sign similar agreements but in practice going after them for damages should this material end up on the internet, or in other people's hands, is going to be more trouble for NBC than it's worth. It's unfortunate but it does make sense. At the moment I think the best hope for this sort of stuff may lie in institutions like UCLA being able to make the footage remotely available as a secure stream on the web--but that's a long way off.
Of course the big question--which is irrelevant if NBC won't provide the material anyway--is whether there is still any copyright at all. If indeed it was actually copyrighted in the first place (not too likely), it fell into the public domain in 1986 if it wasn't renewed (extremely unlikely.)
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