Production companies

So I had reason over the weekend to be interested in a lesser-known movie production company. I was curious to see what all movies they produced, so went to IMDb and the main page for one of the movies they made, from which you can go to a company page, something like this one for A Double Life. When I clicked on the link for the company in question, I got... a request to join IMDbPro to get the information!

I wondered if there were a glitch over selecting some obscure movie producer from the past, so when I was on the A Double Life page, I decided to click on the Universal link, since that's a fairly mainstream company. And I got this. The same thing about joining IMDBPro. Just to find out, say, what movies Universal made in the 1940s? Thankfully, there's still the IMDb Advanced title search for at least the well-known studios, although that will also bring up things that studios distributed rather than producing.

I understand that IMDb needs to make money to keep the site running, and I get the point of IMDb Pro, as a way for people "in the business" to get information on stuff that's in production or pre-production. But I can't help but wonder at the decision to move the historical stuff behind the paywall. What's next? Moving the character search there, too? Or worse, actor searches? I'm probably getting a bit paranoid, though. IMDb has too many users to go the Photobucket route.