Pirating it and storing it on your own storage system. Copyright is unlikely to change materially in the next decade or two.
Quality copies make their way into long term archival systems, for when copyright is possibly less insane. 50 years? 100 years? Doesn't matter, those copies will be safe for the future. It will take time for the electorate and the representatives they elect to turn over ("progress occurs one funeral at a time").
I am not sure about abolishing, but it would already quite help if there was a clear, reasonably timed, copyright period. Like 50 years after publication.
Well, at the very least the answer would be softening copyright to the point where the kind of sampling that kind of media did is permissible again without clearing every single piece sampled. However that would effectively kill copyright because the only way those shows were able to do that was, in a way, what we now call "backroom deals".
IMO companies should have 5 years to make money off what they produce. That should give them time for a theatrical release and a bulk of the at home sales and early streaming boost. For a TV series, maybe it’s 5 years after the show ends. After that, it enters the public domain to avoid media being lost to time and the mess we currently have.
If a studio hasn’t made enough money to recoup their costs and generate some profit in 5 years, it is unlikely they ever will.
I’m not sure how this would work with something like a soap opera that has been on air for 50+ years with no sign of stopping.
I'm a little baffled by the sampling problem. Is a few second small clip of something really representing some sea of lost income damage for the original? Or is it more like femto-dollars per viewing and they want it accounted for?
One of my favorite videos games Blur is unavailable because it came with a licensed sound-track, but the license was only for like ~10 years.
Movies wouldn't be what they'd be without good music. It sets a vibe. So I understand that even short bits of music deserve some compensation. I do wish there was some kind of Fair Reasonable and Non-discrimindatory option available, that set standard rates & would prevent these kind of availability hangups, and expand access.
I do kind of get that artists don't want their work associated with certain things though; certain notable politicians/parties for example seem to have gotten half-a-dizen artists telling them to stop using their music, saying they don't want anything to do with the politician. One could make some kind of horrible terrible slanted movie, and under (F)RAND the artist seemingly wouldn't have recourse from involuntarily becoming the title track. It's complicated. :/
What we have now is awful though. Maybe we just create some hoops to jump through for rights holders. Make it so content-owners have to renew their part of the deal or otherwise the license automatically extends. That way at least some media, rather than being lost, is released. This is vaguely like copyright pre-1976, where folks got 28 years & then could renew for another 28 years.
Neither. It's "the two corporations who own each half of the work want to dictate the conduct of the other half". Same reason why Nintendo and Microsoft couldn't agree on who gets Goldeneye back in the Wii/360 era.
It's more like "we could show this on TV because we had a verbal agreement with the rights owner, but our lawyers won't let us put it on streaming because we probably don't have the actual rights to display that content, and so it's a legal liability we don't need". Do the rights holders actually care? Is it clear who the rights holders actually are? Maybe not, but nobody wants to find out.
Usually music. They get a 5 year broadcast contract and then its gone after that. MTVs sketch comedy show The State comes to mind, now only available as vhs rips.
As a result of these copyright prohibitions Muppet Babies is in much more danger of becoming lost media. A lot of the early film media we lost wasn't just the cinematic flops (though we did lose quite a lot of that) but instead films that may have been blockbusters in their time but were owned by very controlling studios. A classic example of this is 1917's Cleopatra which may have been the most expensive film ever shot.
> The lack of camaraderie among studios in the industry today makes it difficult for Muppet Babies to find a streaming platform home due to copyright royalties and trademark concerns.
Or in other words, they now have to follow the same rules as creators outside this clique and have to pay royalties if they want to use copyrighted material in their work.
EDIT: If you haven't read the article and think I'm being crass: the problem isn't that there are disputes over who holds the copyright. The problem is that the show liberally used live action clips that were in the public domain as well as live action clips that still aren't. And they only got away with it because at the times the people involved in the show were on good terms with the people involved with those movies. They could still release the show without those clips.
Copyright ought to expire much much sooner than 70 years or whatever if a work is not available to reasonably (annd legally) obtain anymore. Copyrights are a balance between the public good, and allowing creators to make money from their creations, but as soon as they have obviously abandoned that, then no one is served by such an absurdly long copyright period. I suppose in this case, since it could perhaps be considered a derivative work, where the originals (Star Wars, for instance) are still available for viewing reasonably, it’s more complicated, but nonetheless this feels like a travesty, which benefits no one at all.
If no one can acquire a product legally and the copyright owners do not release (or worse, delete) the product, it seems like this wouldn’t actually change anything in those cases. The best you could hope for is contentious right holders poisoning the well for the other rights holders by releasing a copy.
There is a similar situation with The Adventures of Pete & Pete from Nickelodeon that is preventing it from being put on Paramount+. Paramount and (I think) Sony both claim some amount of ownership, and instead of hashing it out they've just canned the whole show. It goes back as far as when shows were released on DVD, the 1st and 2nd seasons were released on DVD, the 3rd was pressed and ready to go but never actually shipped
The Drew Carey Show suffers from an interesting similar-ish issue, due to music used throughout it. As a result it’s never gotten released past season 1 on DVD and a one-off compilation DVD. No streaming services.
I keep wondering when/if we'll see media that merely cites other work.
Why embed Nirvana in your show? Just have the video embed something citing the work, and let the viewer and maybe their player go track down & integrate the work.
Not impossible, but for the case of Beavis and Butthead, you’d need tight control over the start/stop timing, the ability to choose a specific version of the video (can’t have some newer one with extra stuff added or some cut or whatever, even just blank space at the beginning or end), the ability to cut away from the video while the audio continues and mix in your own extra audio, all kinds of things like that. It’d be a lot of complexity when you could just… bake it in, which also tends to be the best way to preserve anything, simply connecting all the relevant parts together (practically) inseparably (see: link rot).
or even better, if I upload a video to YouTube and it includes a Nirvana song, and if YouTube has permission from Interscope to distribute Nirvana music by virtue of an explicit license or the fact that Interscope uploaded a bunch of Nirvana videos, since it's YouTube doing the distributing shouldn't their licenses cover all? Don't even bother technically under the hood digging up the licensed copy
> the 1st and 2nd seasons were released on DVD, the 3rd was pressed and ready to go but never actually shipped
The Muppet Show itself had a similar issue—the show was 5 seasons, but seasons 4 & 5 never made it to DVD. I had assumed that they were gone for good, but Disney+ actually released all 5 seasons.
Maybe someday we'll also see the later versions of The Muppet Show, like "Muppets Tonight" or "the muppets.". But I'm not holding my breath.
>There is a similar situation with The Adventures of Pete & Pete from Nickelodeon that is preventing it from being put on Paramount+
The upside to things being stuck in permissions-purgatory is that it's usually all available in bootleg format on Youtube (albeit in terrible quality), as there's no one directly responsible to copyright strike it. The full series has been up there for a while.
This article doesn't provide any detail about what claims are made, or who makes them. It doesn't even mention who owns copyright on the show. The one quote talks about how Jim Henson was well-liked... there is no mention of copyright in the quote.
IMO I’m willing to accept the loss (and it is huge) of access to media if people follow this, but I truly and deeply believe that anyone who wants to tightly control some intellectual or cultural “property” should put it in a plain cardboard box and file it in the darkest corner of the most inhospitable warehouse never to be seen from (or profited off of) again.
At least then we could mourn properly before moving on and creating works freely without the chilling effects caused by the looming threat of being sued for accidentally making something similar.
All 7 seasons are well seeded on the torrents. It's hard for media to become lost these days, but if you want to see a lot of it, you aren't going to do so legally under such a ludicrous IP regime.
Definitely not. They appear to be SD rips of television broadcasts. Obviously it would be best if rights holders made their media available for reasonable prices on reasonable services, but until we have sane IP laws, hobbyist preservation efforts will be the predominant way that some media will be preserved for consumption at all, quality notwithstanding.
It sucks, and I don't know what the answer is.