5 ms·

Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available? Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies,

Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available? Streaming and on-demand content delivery, rather than purchased physical copies, does the same damage to other content as to games. Per internet traditions, the porn industry is leading the way. No doubt the copyrights to millions of porn films belong to long-defunct studios, leaving no legal access. Today is it porn, tomorrow it will be the older Futurama episodes. But industries want this state of affairs. Any time spent with old content is time not purchasing the new content. To keep the content creation industry going consumers need to forget past material. Want to watch old Simpsons episodes? Want to play the original Civilization? No. Those are dead. Here are some new versions.

PaulHoule 3y ago
There was a show in the late 1980’s called Murphy’s Law about an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse like the base in Sneakers and had an asian girlfriend. It had some of the best comedic pacing I’d ever seen on TV but only made one short season and never got into syndication or home video which is too bad.
- geswit2x 3y ago
  Damn, I'm curious now
coding123 3y ago
I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to "cloud own" permanently.
tibbon 3y ago
Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall) ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply difficult to obtain.
- rcarr 3y ago
  For old books it's understandable but for modern books it's unforgivable. Even if the author is old school and wrote it on a typewriter or by hand, at some point that book has been digitised for production. I wanted a book recently that is paper only and was published in 2015. I emailed the publisher to request if they'd make it available as an eBook and they didn't even bother replying. Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me. Because digital books are horrible. A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement. Just ask anyone who collects painting or movie posters. A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf. One book that I purchased new only two years ago for <100$ is now out of print and apparently going for 500+ on ebay/amazon.
    - rcarr 3y ago
      > Because digital books are horrible. Completely subjective. > A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement. Er yes there is. A large tablet. Which would allow you to zoom in on those images in high resolution if the book was formatted properly by the publisher. Connect some AR glasses and now you've got a massive book you can read comfortably anywhere without strain. > A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf. It absolutely is, particularly if your book is primarily text and you want to search that text on a regular basis. Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you. Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the military. Unless you know the book back to front (and even then it's debatable) searching via a computer is going to be faster than flipping through pages manually. The digital file will not decay (unless the underlying hard drive decays) and it can be available, theoretically, forever. It can be shipped around the globe in the blink of an eye, and doesn't require anywhere near the same carbon footprint to do so. It can be easily replicated and the potential market is anyone, anywhere, on the entire planet rather than anyone with access to a book store or living in a location where a bookstore will ship to. No-one is trying to take your paper books away. But presumably a digital file of that book was sent to the printers. So why is that digital file not readily available for consumers to purchase to consume in the manner that best suits them?
atum47 3y ago
I've been searching for Scrubs for a while now. I don't know if it's due to the country I live or what, but I can't find the whole show to watch. I saw they have it on Hulu, but the app itself seems like a nightmare. As I'm writing this post, if I try to log in Hulu I get a message "Something went wrong. Please try again later." I guess my parents pay for a delivery service here that gives us access to Disney and Star+, but I don't know for sure if Hulu is included in the package. There are so many streaming services now a days that I can't keep track of the ones I have access to anymore. I've been thinking about going back to torrents sites and trying to get it unofficially;
- jprete 3y ago
  You might need to go to DVD for something that old. There are advantages to getting owned DVDs, like the fact that they can't mess with the content later. Music licensing problems are fairly common. For Scrubs Season 1 in particular, they had to change all the music around for Netflix's streamed version. The DVD version, as far as I know, has the original music.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Northern Exposure. The only why to get the untouched version and with no music cuts it's to pirate it thanks to the lobbies.
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      > with no music cutswith no music cuts Dark Skies. It was x-files if set in the 1960s. But as it used music from the time, the classic music licenses have since expired and nobody is willing to pay enough to renew them.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Also, why in the world isn't The Twilight Zone (the one from the 50's) in the public domain? It already set up the genre, it has been exploited in TV with ads for sure for decades. Also, I think Rod Sterling is not alive since a good chunk of time, ditto with the producers. There no loss on torrenting that series. If any, it would help on sales on current sci-fi series.
3-cheese-sundae 3y ago
If the original entity that owns a copyright is no longer around to enforce it, does it still have an owner?
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Usually someone will have bought the copyright when it was liquidated. If it was dissolved while still owning the copyright then it becomes bona vacantia. What happens to that depends on the country, in the UK it technically becomes property of the King, and you can buy the rights from the government.
criddell 3y ago
> How many films and TV-sows are now not legally available? Or if they are, they've been changed to remove material that can't be distributed. WKRP in Cincinnati is an example of this. From the Wikipedia page for the show: > WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time, music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years, but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties.
RobotToaster 3y ago
Probably the majority. Many older works are permanently lost, or the few film copies remaining are rotting in vaults.
zokier 3y ago
Yeah, I found the articles comparison to Titanic bit of a miss, while it specifically might be reasonably well available, tons of classic movies and even more so tv is not, same as games. Books would have been maybe better comparison, they I think have bit better availability in general.
reaperducer 3y ago
Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available? Hundreds. Probably thousands. A few years ago I started watching noir films. Once you get past the Criterion Collection, it gets harder and harder to find the good stuff. A lot of it never made it to VHS. Even fewer made it to DVD. Compared with the number that were made, hardly any made it to streaming. It's even worse for television. One example among many: 77 Sunset Strip.
xtracto 3y ago
Reminded me of this article I read the other day: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent-films-lost/3866383/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent... "The Library of Congress conducted the first comprehensive survey of silent films over the past two years and found 70% are believed to be lost. Of the nearly 11,000 silent feature films made in America between 1912 and 1930, the survey found only 14% still exist in their original format. About 11% of the films that survive only exist as foreign versions or on lower-quality formats." It's too sad that we as a species are allowing our culture and history to be lost ... for some temporal profit of a minority of people. Any IP that is 20+ year old should be automatically free to copy.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  To argue the other side, why should we store things forever? Storing things and organizing them has a cost, and if modern society thinks a particular work is no longer interesting, why not let it be forgotten? Do you think our grandchildren’s grandchildren in 2196 will still want to watch a B- level movie produced in the 1980’’s?
cush 3y ago
Countless movies and shows are out of print and only available on VHS
kawogi 3y ago
I'm still trying to get MythBusters and DuckTales* in German. I can only find fragments on youtube and some shady websites. I'm totally willing to pay full price, but there's simply no offer. Edit: I just learned about justwatch.com (thanks HN!) There's one streaming service listed which offers at least two seasons for 7 € per month - including commercials :/ it became so hard to buy stuff legally. * the available DVD are incomplete. I could fill some gaps in English.

PaulHoule 3y ago

There was a show in the late 1980’s called Murphy’s Law about an insurance investigator who lived on a floor of a warehouse like the base in Sneakers and had an asian girlfriend. It had some of the best comedic pacing I’d ever seen on TV but only made one short season and never got into syndication or home video which is too bad.

geswit2x 3y ago
Damn, I'm curious now

coding123 3y ago

I feel like TV/Movies are generally more available in Amazon for rent at least. Not great to be required to pay the same prices as we did in the past. For example the original TMNT is 3.99 to watch (rent) and $13 to buy. It seems to me like it should be $1 or free on some subscription network and $3 to "cloud own" permanently.

tibbon 3y ago

Books too. The vast majority of books (or paper media overall) ever printed are no longer available new. There _might_ be some electronic version, but realistically not. Library systems help fill this in, but there are so many titles are are simply difficult to obtain.

rcarr 3y ago
For old books it's understandable but for modern books it's unforgivable. Even if the author is old school and wrote it on a typewriter or by hand, at some point that book has been digitised for production. I wanted a book recently that is paper only and was published in 2015. I emailed the publisher to request if they'd make it available as an eBook and they didn't even bother replying. Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> Why on earth publishers continue to release paper only books in 2023 is beyond me. Because digital books are horrible. A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement. Just ask anyone who collects painting or movie posters. A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf. One book that I purchased new only two years ago for <100$ is now out of print and apparently going for 500+ on ebay/amazon.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    > Because digital books are horrible. Completely subjective. > A have a self of work-related books full of reference images (military equipment). I budget about 100/month for book purchases as many of them are 200+ each. There is no plausible replacement. Er yes there is. A large tablet. Which would allow you to zoom in on those images in high resolution if the book was formatted properly by the publisher. Connect some AR glasses and now you've got a massive book you can read comfortably anywhere without strain. > A digital file is no replacement for a reference copy on a shelf. It absolutely is, particularly if your book is primarily text and you want to search that text on a regular basis. Or if you're out in the field and you don't have space to carry an entire library of maintenance books with you. Which might actually be quite a common scenario in the military. Unless you know the book back to front (and even then it's debatable) searching via a computer is going to be faster than flipping through pages manually. The digital file will not decay (unless the underlying hard drive decays) and it can be available, theoretically, forever. It can be shipped around the globe in the blink of an eye, and doesn't require anywhere near the same carbon footprint to do so. It can be easily replicated and the potential market is anyone, anywhere, on the entire planet rather than anyone with access to a book store or living in a location where a bookstore will ship to. No-one is trying to take your paper books away. But presumably a digital file of that book was sent to the printers. So why is that digital file not readily available for consumers to purchase to consume in the manner that best suits them?

atum47 3y ago

I've been searching for Scrubs for a while now. I don't know if it's due to the country I live or what, but I can't find the whole show to watch. I saw they have it on Hulu, but the app itself seems like a nightmare. As I'm writing this post, if I try to log in Hulu I get a message "Something went wrong. Please try again later." I guess my parents pay for a delivery service here that gives us access to Disney and Star+, but I don't know for sure if Hulu is included in the package. There are so many streaming services now a days that I can't keep track of the ones I have access to anymore. I've been thinking about going back to torrents sites and trying to get it unofficially;

jprete 3y ago
You might need to go to DVD for something that old. There are advantages to getting owned DVDs, like the fact that they can't mess with the content later. Music licensing problems are fairly common. For Scrubs Season 1 in particular, they had to change all the music around for Netflix's streamed version. The DVD version, as far as I know, has the original music.
- anthk 3y ago
  Northern Exposure. The only why to get the untouched version and with no music cuts it's to pirate it thanks to the lobbies.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    > with no music cutswith no music cuts Dark Skies. It was x-files if set in the 1960s. But as it used music from the time, the classic music licenses have since expired and nobody is willing to pay enough to renew them.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Also, why in the world isn't The Twilight Zone (the one from the 50's) in the public domain? It already set up the genre, it has been exploited in TV with ads for sure for decades. Also, I think Rod Sterling is not alive since a good chunk of time, ditto with the producers. There no loss on torrenting that series. If any, it would help on sales on current sci-fi series.

3-cheese-sundae 3y ago

If the original entity that owns a copyright is no longer around to enforce it, does it still have an owner?

RobotToaster 3y ago
Usually someone will have bought the copyright when it was liquidated. If it was dissolved while still owning the copyright then it becomes bona vacantia. What happens to that depends on the country, in the UK it technically becomes property of the King, and you can buy the rights from the government.

criddell 3y ago

> How many films and TV-sows are now not legally available? Or if they are, they've been changed to remove material that can't be distributed. WKRP in Cincinnati is an example of this. From the Wikipedia page for the show: > WKRP was videotaped rather than filmed because at the time, music-licensing fees were lower for videotaped programs, a loophole that was intended to accommodate variety shows. Music licensing deals that were cut at the time of production covered only a limited number of years, but when the show entered syndication shortly after its 1982 cancellation, most of the original music remained intact because the licensing deals were still active. After the licenses had expired, later syndicated versions of the show did not feature the music as first broadcast, with stock production music inserted in place of the original songs to avoid paying additional royalties.

RobotToaster 3y ago

Probably the majority. Many older works are permanently lost, or the few film copies remaining are rotting in vaults.

zokier 3y ago

Yeah, I found the articles comparison to Titanic bit of a miss, while it specifically might be reasonably well available, tons of classic movies and even more so tv is not, same as games. Books would have been maybe better comparison, they I think have bit better availability in general.

reaperducer 3y ago

Corollary question: How many films and TV-shows are now not legally available? Hundreds. Probably thousands. A few years ago I started watching noir films. Once you get past the Criterion Collection, it gets harder and harder to find the good stuff. A lot of it never made it to VHS. Even fewer made it to DVD. Compared with the number that were made, hardly any made it to streaming. It's even worse for television. One example among many: 77 Sunset Strip.

xtracto 3y ago

Reminded me of this article I read the other day: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent-films-lost/3866383/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/12/04/silent... "The Library of Congress conducted the first comprehensive survey of silent films over the past two years and found 70% are believed to be lost. Of the nearly 11,000 silent feature films made in America between 1912 and 1930, the survey found only 14% still exist in their original format. About 11% of the films that survive only exist as foreign versions or on lower-quality formats." It's too sad that we as a species are allowing our culture and history to be lost ... for some temporal profit of a minority of people. Any IP that is 20+ year old should be automatically free to copy.

SamuelAdams 3y ago
To argue the other side, why should we store things forever? Storing things and organizing them has a cost, and if modern society thinks a particular work is no longer interesting, why not let it be forgotten? Do you think our grandchildren’s grandchildren in 2196 will still want to watch a B- level movie produced in the 1980’’s?

cush 3y ago

Countless movies and shows are out of print and only available on VHS

kawogi 3y ago

I'm still trying to get MythBusters and DuckTales* in German. I can only find fragments on youtube and some shady websites. I'm totally willing to pay full price, but there's simply no offer. Edit: I just learned about justwatch.com (thanks HN!) There's one streaming service listed which offers at least two seasons for 7 € per month - including commercials :/ it became so hard to buy stuff legally. * the available DVD are incomplete. I could fill some gaps in English.