WKRP, Beavis and Butthead (obviously), even more-recent shows like Skins (UK) have had this problem.

One of the major causes of the best version of certain things only being available for those sailing the high seas.

Seems like Beavis and Butthead would be pretty easy to cut out the music video sections

That’s how it’s been released, but that’s a huge part of the show.

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

Obviously they don't, but they should