What exactly is a “classic” film?

Are the films Jaws 3-D, Home Alone 2, and Smokey and the Bandit “classics”?  That was the question a New York judge had to answer after Time Warner Cable sued the American Movie Classics channel for running such fare instead of the “classic” films it had agreed to air.

And the answer, said Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried, is “no.”  He ruled that AMC breached its contract with Time Warner, thus allowing the cable company to drop the channel.  The audio of an NPR story is here.