This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content. They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else but that kind of thinking would be beyond their competency. It's no wonder they go in such huge losses despite of having loyal audience and monopoly over unparalleled content. To this day I cannot get over the fact that there are literally millions documentaries out there made with a lot of love and hard work but only available through DVD or mailing in a check to some dude. Similarly, lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators. Fortunately, audience did digitized them nicely and uploaded over to torrents and that's the only way to get them today. Same goes of out of print books and magazines. The producers of this content could have easily digitized it and uploaded over to some marketplace and made at least free coffee money for rest of their lives but surprisingly they just never get around doing it. IMO, it just expresses complete naivety and disregard to importance of their own content. They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.
There is a huge startup opportunity here for folks who are willing to chase these content and do the last mile on their behalf.
They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else..
That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial sense.
This sounds like regulatory failure creating a deadweight loss. IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong.
> IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong
They definitely further the creation, as we can't see the old stuff! I find music to be particularly bad here. People on Youtube can clip videos with fair use and talk over them, but any audio with music in needs to be muted, even if it's part of the fair use, because music is enforced so stringently.
If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, but didn't have veto over publication, how bad would that be? The reasons people usually justify copyright protection usually centre on rewarding the creators, and I think the right to stop people seeing your work is a harder sell.
There is of course a new question of how to set the price, but you could e.g. have an auction of some kind where the highest bid must be accepted.
(There are certainly notable cases like Mein Kampf where copyright has been conspicuously used to prevent further distribution.)
> If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, [...]
How much would they get paid? What if they wanted to hold out for more? Would every piece of copyrighted material be paid the same? Or would you normalise it per sentence or per letter? Or per frame in a movie?
Also to a first approximation we can treat all music as roughly interchangeable and we can measure the 'amount' of music eg by runtime or by song, so compulsory licensing can set some arbitrary fees.
You can perhaps do something similar for video, but it's hard to do that for all copyrighted material. Eg for a video game a single sprite has a very different value than some modules in the game's engine.
I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain.
I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options.
The normalization can be the same as licensing is done now, "per work", negotiating specific usages needn't change, except that the seller has to allow that each covered work be subject to at least one must-sell auction per e.g. year. They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.
Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.
Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.
You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.
Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)
There is some system like this for music in Austria. I may record a new version of your song but it entitles you to a writers credit and some guaranteed amount of all revenue.
But is this content available somewhere else then? Should it not have been archived then or given to those who hold those rights so they could publish?
> They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.
The people making these decisions didn't spend any time, blood, or sweat on producing this content. That's why it's so easy for them to discard it: they're only concerned with making (big) money, not figuring out how they can preserve content without incurring a loss. Which, IMO, should be the goal for older, historical content.
I'm pretty sure the money we're paying countries for wars would cover historical content preservation costs a gazillion times over.
> lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators.
Or worse. Rust In Peace was completely rerecorded by studio musicians and that's what you get if you look for it on Spotify or even buy a new CD today! To actually hear the album as recorded originally, you need to find a thirty-year old disc and just deal with the scratches.
GP is not quite correct. It wasn't completely re-recorded, but Dave Mustaine re-recorded many of the guitar solos on the album, and the whole album was remixed.
At any rate, it's not the same (classic, imo) album that was released in 1990.
Exactly, I'm not going to argue that artists don't have the right to re-release their material. It's the destruction of the original that to me is unconscionable.
Imagine this in a historical context, what if the publisher of Poe or Hemingway just decided to burn all their manuscripts and stop publishing because it was a better tax write off than their accountants though they would make on the lifetime sales of the work.
Because this is exactly what we are doing to future generations, lighting art on fire.
> This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content
Have you not seen the U.S.? It doesn't matter. The system is orchestrated to existing money-people making money simply for having it in the first place.
Even "bankruptcy" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Your interest or legitimate use cases do. not matter. At all. Ever. For entertainment or technology.
They can still sell it. We shouldn't assume because the webservers were shut down that everything is deleted and gone. When the article says it's "gone" they mean it is no longer available to the public.
What proofs do you have that he is doing that? I mean I'm not him and my first instinct if I saw your previous comment "What are you even talking about. When is the last time you went to comedycentral.com to watch something... This is giant self-righteous paragraph of junk." would be to downvote it.
I'd downvote it because of "self-righteous paragraph of junk." and because I strongly believe that historical content should be maintained.
I don't really care to recover my older account on my MBP with a dead logic board. Do you want me to recover a really old account for a measurement-contest
This is the same as Facebook/Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. taking something down for "hate speech" or "community guidelines". OP reported my original comment the same way Paramount removed content. Bit of a double-standard. I advocate for torrent, to believe in a large corporation to up-hold content (like a comment on the internet, or a TV series) who is surprised it moved to a paid streaming service.
I don't think it's even possible for a user to down-vote a direct reply to their own comment.
I can't see the post you're complaining about; but based on the tone of the rest of your messages, maybe you were just off topic or rude-atop-the-soapbox and others flagged you?
There is a huge startup opportunity here for folks who are willing to chase these content and do the last mile on their behalf.