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For me, ________ is basically all sports games that have ever been broadcast. Most of them are just locked away somewhere, with literally no legal way for anyone to see them.
Libraries = you have a fundamental right to free media
The precedent is already established. Piracy is the modern library. Media and software ownership needs to be something like 3 years from public release. No, you can't make one cool thing and exploit that for 100 years, and you can't milk your mediocrity either. If your BS sucks, everyone will just wait for 3 years to consume it for free. So what, you suck at your job and need to find other work. If all software was open source after 3 years, the entire world would advance much more quickly and equally. Capitalism only works if everyone can enter, no one is too big to fail, and the consolidation is a guaranteed failure.
The infuriating thing is, I truly believe the dragons would make more money if they conceded to everything you just said. As it stands, collector's style box sets still make a lot of money, and everyone knows that merch is where the really sweet cash gets raked in.
If they just hosted basically everything on the Internet, for everyone to watch, for free, that would massively increase the mindshare install base of all their media, which would make way more people likely to buy shirts, bobbleheads, posters, etc.
The profit margins on that stuff = ABSOLUTELY VAST, BEYOND ALL BELIEF. And the fucked up thing is, you sometimes DO see official merch being sold for properties that can't be legally watched, anywhere. You already paid for that show to be made, possibly 60 years ago. You could increase those merch sales any time you want, just by letting people see it.
But dragons are gonna dragon. Hoarding behavior.
I broadly agree. I would generally want to push that out from three years to something more like ten years, just so that small creators can have the time to finish series they want to make without needing to rush, but I think that adults should be able to freely consume and remix the content they enjoyed as children.
Oh, and companies shouldn't be able to hold a copyright. People make things, not companies. If a person makes a thing, they have made it and they deserve the right to it; maybe I would be amenable to a temporary but automatic license for work-for-hire which expires after a much shorter time (maybe the three years you mentioned).
If a company wants to monetize a property, they should appropriately compensate the people who made it. If they aren't being fair about their compensation, the people should be able to take their intellectual property elsewhere.
Oh, and companies shouldn’t be able to hold a copyright. People make things, not companies
Agreed. At the very least, there should DEFINITELY be some heavy regulation, governing how companies can go about transferring the rights, between each other.
I have a horrible feeling that some of this problem comes down to the media dragons waiting for some moment of peak nostalgia, for each media property, only desiring to sell it to another dragon when it's at its most valuable. It's like a fucking commodity market, but for our childhood memories, instead of copper or soybeans.
That's the only explanation I can think of, for why they wouldn't always want to take our money. Dragon A owns the rights to a specific show, but they don't actually operate a streaming platform. They just have their hoard of media rights that they're sitting on. They could sell or lease this particular media property to Dragon B, who does have a streaming platform, and maybe Dragon B has always wanted to buy it. But Dragon A is waiting for the nostalgia peak to happen, so they can charge the highest price possible.
Finally, when the specific Millennial age cohort that remembers that specific show starts talking about it on social media a lot, and noticing that you can't watch it anywhere, Dragon A finally does decide to sell it to Dragon B.
But then, of course, Dragon B will never be satisfied with the result. Even if they do see an actual jump in their subscriber numbers, which can be at least somewhat reliably tied to that media acquisition, it'll never be enough to actually pay for the ridiculously inflated price they shelled out. So, of course, when the time comes to re-up those rights, they angrily refuse to pay anything to keep them.
Annnnnd the media goes back into the limbo hole, not to be seen again for another few decades.
It's basically a bubble situation. Our memories are just a series of goddamned market bubbles, being speculatively traded by these monsters.
In my opinion, that's just a side effect of the fact that media dragons have changed their business model. Rather than earning profits by making things, they've discovered that it's less risky to earn profit by owning things, and that making things is just an unhappy prerequisite for continuing to hoard them. They're not only dragons hoarding all the things, they're very timid dragons hoarding all the things, not willing to step out of their cave to get more gold because it might mean that the gold they bring back won't be as much as the gold they already have.
That's why Zaslav is killing off completed movies for a tax break, and that's why the cost of hosting or producing discs for beloved old properties isn't worth what they can make off of it, and that's why they continue to milk old IPs and adaptations even when they've gone far past the point where it would make financial sense to just come up with something new. I mean, they really only make something new so that they can own it later.
You're right about it being a bubble. They're exactly like landlords, and they're contributing just as much to society.
I paid for Amazon prime, Paramount+, and "Ad Free" and it still fucking gives me ads!
I shit-canned Prime on the spot when they announced ads. They already lock most their content off behind further paywalls anyway.
Jellyfin ain't got no ads though.
You know how mythology often has creatures acting according to arcane, often senseless, and incomprehensible but utterly unyielding rules?
... you might be onto something here.
Drivers and software packages for older hardware. I know we can't expect any company to support old stuff forever, but they incessantly purge driver downloads to "save hosting costs" and it makes a lot of retro but usable hardware paperweights. And since their "private intellectual property" they never post it to any kind of open source site, regardless of how old...
This is why the Internet Archive is so incredibly important. If anyone is going to donate money to any causes, put that shit HIGH UP ON THE PRIORITY LIST.
I was going to say Dino-Riders, which was one of my favorite cartoons in the late 80s that I never hear anyone talk about any more, but apparently most of the episodes are on YouTube right now! I guess that's what I'll be doing this weekend lol I had a bunch of the toys when I was a kid!
most of the episodes are on YouTube right now! I guess that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend
This section of your comment sums up the problem better than my meme ever could. That shit is on YouTube right now. Very key words. "Right now," like, at this particular moment.
And you're going to watch it this weekend.
As in, before the dragons take that shit down.
All creative works should become public domain in 18 years. Capitalism requires infinite growth, right? Well, there ya go! See how that helps?
Can't argue with that logic. If we're going to say "nah, we'll just be continuing to pump CO2 into the sky and hollowing out the ground for every scrap of precious minerals, until we literally strip the whole globe of every resource we can scavenge from it, and we've poisoned every liter of drinkable water, BECAUSE THE ECONOMY DEMANDS IT," then yeah, we should be placing a similar demand on infinitely growing creative resources, as well.
The irony, of course, being that CREATIVE RESOURCES ACTUALLY ARE FUCKING FUNCTIONALLY INFINITE.
Keep feeding these artist motherfuckers and they'll keep giving you fucking ideas. Goddamn. That should seem like a sweet deal, right?
Imo it should be only like 1 year if the owner of the media is not providing it for sale anywhere.
The entire Unreal series of games.
Cough fuck Epic Games. You used to be cool.
For me, it was an obscure Canadian tv show from the 80s called 'The Odyssey' - but I contacted the rights-holders and they sent me a dvd set of the show for $50.
Fun fact: Ryan Reynolds has a small part in it
glowers at Nintendo
The reason a lot of those shows is actually pretty fucked. They want ownership to the shows because any product still sold based on the show still gives them profits. However, if they put up access to the show, views = royalties they need to pay to the creators + licensing costs. The profit for that isnt enough and they wanna funnel more views onto more popular media to concept profits on shows with the lowest costs + has the highest profit to cost ratio.
Tldr: it's about appeasing shareholders, as it always is.
Anything financed with public funds.
There's no reason why a public broadcaster's archive isn't all digitized and made available for a fee (to finance the project) to people living in their country.
Same for scientific research and studies for various projects.
My ____ is Iron Chef with the original music. It was from the movie "Backdraft" so they had to remove it from all the YouTube versions, but they also cut out the sound of Chairman Kaga's shoes and his bite of the pepper.
They ruined the show because there's somebody out there who still wants their pound of flesh from a movie that's 33 years old.
1st season of supernatural, simply because they didn't secure the streaming rights for the music. First season doesn't hit the same with the alternate music.
Not exactly a fit for the context but Angus was a really (REALLY) well done YA/coming of age film. The protagonist was a believable marginal/outsider character without being a caricature-he’s overweight, but he’s strong and plays football, his dad is gone and his mom is a long haul trucker so he mostly is raised by his grandpa. His love object is a girl who ultimately calls him out for objectifying her and it’s handled really well.
Because of some weird rights issues it only ever got a VHS release. I’d love to be able to show it to my kids.
Insert willy coyote vs acme refrence:
I want to watch "dark angel" from James Cameron, but like in decent quality thank you
Short Circuit! Can’t get even a decent DVD anywhere. I mean, it’s not even my favourite movie or something, just would like to see it again. And it was kot exactly niche or something.
Steve Guttenberg was in that, too. You'd think he'd be able to get the Stonecutters to pull some strings and release that shit.
Who controls the British pound?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
History channel once played something called "History Rocks" and it's just an hour long documentary of period specific events, but there's no voice over narrating anything. Instead they played raw footage with music from that time period and subtitles at the bottom explaining what was happening. I saw one episode for Vietnam once and hearing "The Police - SOS" while watching personnel shove helicopters off flight decks to make room for more evacuees from Saigon really showed just how awful it was. I can't seem to find those episodes anywhere.
Battle for Middle Earth games. Both were awesome and can be played easily on modern hardware. But because of legal shit and the owners not carring enough you can't give them money to play it. And the demand is there, based on how much disks go on eBay.
The McRib^TM^ Movie
I think I'll order some. Thanks for the idea!
The whole copywrite system exists to control culture and detach us from our cultural history
The first Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and Do You Remember Love for anyone outside of Japan. To piggy back off this, fuck Harmony Gold and Palladium Games too.
The Oblongs. It’s nowhere. It’s a terrible show but I’m a terrible person who likes terrible things
2006’s The Fall. Probably the best visual story telling in any movie. The only way to get it is to find it used.
This all gets a lot less infuriating when you remember 'laws are bullshit', 'ownership is theft', and 'fuck you, corporate swine'.
____ could be a cartoon like Chop Sockey Chooks for me as one example. Someone was able to upload all the however many episodes that got released on TV onto yt and I think they were just recording off their computer while viewing an official DVD. It's always only a matter of time until someone finds it and gets it taken down despite it not being available on any known streaming service where I live.
That, or Class of 3000 where if I remember correctly, there might be an episode or 2 that is considered lost media in English because Cartoon Network hasn't done anything with it since cancellation as far as I'm aware.
Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea
It is a French cartoon whose English dub aired on a Nickelodeon in the early '80s. It had everything my young imagination could want in a story - an alien world within our own, strange people and cultures, a mysterious guide, a man overcoming a difficult past, and an ancient cataclysm whose threats echo into the world today.
It also had the most slapping opening theme I may have ever heard.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/CG6aGpnP6kSuiXbY/?mibextid=jmPrMh
Sorry for the Facebook link, but this is the only active copy of the opening I can find because the corporate takedown game is strong for a 40-year-old cartoon that can only be watched in Australia.
I only obey laws that aren't stupid.