Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), “Mission to the Unknown” (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist.”
Internet archives should be an entity receiving funding through tax dollars. They should be archiving a lot more of the internet, too, including all media. All tax paying citizens should have access to it through a govt provided email acct. Artists should apply for grants instead of relying on corporate residuals.
Socialize copyright.
Copyright should be set to its original 25 year limits. Then we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
Copyright makes a lot less sense with the internet.
The barriers to entry to markets are so low.
If I write a song, and you hear it, steal it and record it, I can’t really say “well hey man I was saving up money to get some studio time.”
Virtually every market has an analogous situation with it’s copyright. Not all, but most.
I just noticed a Disney film with the 100 years logo, and realized they still have copyright on their OG stuff. Too bad. It was never meant to establish a dynasty, just a bit of crumb before your work went into public domain. Sigh…
It would be less of a problem. But most of the media I consume is younger than that, and yet it is still at risk of going away at any moment. Nobody wants to even sell digital copies, except for the ones on CD, DVD, etc. Most of the time your only option is a “license” to access it, or a monthly subscription. A couple of years ago I “bought” the new Blade Runner on Google Play. Turns out now you can only watch above 480p on their approved devices. Which does not include my PC, my main device. The same goes for the streaming services, you get shafted on quality if you aren’t using a “smart” tv.
They should be archiving a lot more of the internet, too, including all media
Maybe most media; there’s stuff that should not exist.
And yes, two girls, one cup and one man, one bottle are within the preservation threshold.
But Highlander 2 is not.
I was talking more like child pornography should no be preserved.
Just the thought of it makes me ill. I don’t get it. Even before my two daughters were born it was pretty gross and I got why they were shanked all the time in prison but once I had them… it went to disgust and the possibility of jail time if someone did anything like that to them.
Here is the suck… there HAS to be an archive of it to be used to help save kids, identify locations, get other clues, etc… Without an archive, it would be near impossible to do anything.
For a small glimpse of that fucked shit and why an archive is needed, check out a yt vid called Mr Swirl: The Internet’s Most Disturbed User. It’s not even a vid on why archiving is good, it’s just a vid on how they got this shitheel but proves my point.
You’ll pry the box set of the original cut of the first 3 movies from my cold dead hands, it’s the best nosedive in quality money can buy.
If I build a house, you buy it, that’s it. I worked and got paid. Why in the ever loving fuck do people get paid for work they did 30, 40, 70 years ago?!
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Because the music, TV show, movie, or other media is a product they created and continue to sell copies of. If you build many copies of that house and sell more and more you continue getting paid.
They should be archiving a lot more of the internet, too, including all media.
They do, they have an extensive collection of scanned books, music and film.
I’m aware of the extent to which they archive, and I stand by my statement
Legally they can’t do much due to copyright.
The UK archive apparently archives everything. Tom Scott recently did a video about it.
You mean this video? https://youtu.be/ce-QHeZnVu4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/ce-QHeZnVu4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
They are digitising Marion Stokes’ collection
Yes I agree, we definitely need archival of many more parts of the Internet. It’s a lot harder for people now to access stuff that is no longer “popular” (I’m referring to streaming services here) and since so many shows are on so many different services that are raising costs it’s easier for stuff to get lost
I’m not pirating porn because I’m a cheapskate, it’s because I’m a digital archivist trying to preserve cultural artifacts for future generations.
There are only so many gaping asshole cumshots that need to be preserved for future generations. At some point you will need to move on… …to pantyhose footjobs.
… Brazilian fart porn
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There was documentary done a few years back on the comedian Bob Monkhouse and about his obsession archiving media, a lot of which were thought to be lost forever. He had multiple VHS players set up around his house to record things in an era where not many of the general public had one. He also kept tv guides and had written into the margins if there was a change in the schedule. He was actually taken to court in the 70’s for copyright infringement but the case was thrown out, though quite a few items from his archive were seized and never returned.
My grandfather got really into video archiving and from the early 80s through 2005 amassed about 14,000 video tapes, mostly of various aviation TV shows. He spent his entire life as an engineer for Lockheed. His entire 2-story condo in San Diego was a massive VHS library with shelving extending 8 ft high.
Anyways, my father and aunt threw it all in a dumpster because they didn’t know what to do with it. All they kept were his ashes… Which almost 20 years later are still sitting on a bookshelf somewhere
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It was called The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse. I think there might be a very poor quality version of it on YouTube.
Wow that’s dedication.
I knew what this was from without reading the description. Such a sad portion of a wikipedia article to read.
Tonee?
I’m the unknown fourth member of the group, Jeff
I wish there were something like bittorrent that worked better as an archival mechanism. The weakness of bittorrent is that material tends to disappear completely when there is no longer widespread popular interest in it.
Was just thinking about this. Usenet guarantees a certain amount of time ~10 years, and a torrent only lasts as long as people are willing to seed. The problem is, long term seeding takes up too much individual space, and I never know when it’s necessary. Obviously I’m not wasting 500GB of storage to seed something with 100+ seeders. More trackers should offer bonus points for things with less than 2-3 seeders to ensure long term survival of the media.
Usenet doesn’t guarantee any time at all. Content is purged regularly if it’s not being downloaded.
Don’t even have to go that far back. Look at Netflix removing the DnD Community episode because Chang dresses as a drow elf (black skin, white hair). He even says he’s a drow in the episode yet Netflix removed it from the series since it was “racist”. Without pirates that episode would quickly be forgotten.
Shirley even says “we just gonna ignore this hate crime right here?” like it’s 100% meant to be a meta joke about blackface. But, even comedic irony isn’t allowed in this context with streaming services. Disney cut like 5 episodes of Sunny from streaming because Dee in brownface and Mac in blackface.
Oh true, I didn’t even think about preservation of different versions of episodes
I think an Asian man wearing drowface is a complicated issue with no right answers. But the multiple times Pierce wears explicit brownface are way worse, and if anything was to be removed, they should have gone first.
Even if it would be full on black face it would be totally aslong as it isnt gloryfied to do so since it’s art. Do you think all actors who dressed as nazis should be shamed aswell?
Wearing traditional black clothes is not necessarily racist. Wearing blackface has a long history of being directly racist.
There isn’t an equivalent with wearing Nazi clothes.
Sure wearing a swastika is totally normal… the outlash after prince harry had one on halloween wasn’t equivalent to someone wearing blackface at all…
The point is art has the right to open a discussion and to show the bad sites of society. It’s ok for a non racist artist to play a racist and that includes letting that character wear blackface or a swastika.
It’s also fine to do something controversial like wearing a blackface in the context of cosplay to have the society talk about it.
The context being that Chang is a freak that doesn’t understand being a regular human, and Pierce is politically incorrect because he’s a fossil of a human. They’re both immediately challenged for wearing blackface by the group.
I agree on the count of Chang, but not Pierce. The group allowed him to use his “shwami” act as part of a plot-crucial heist while taking Greendale back from Chang’s army. And besides, I’ve heard rumours that Chevy Chase really was like that offstage too. Apparently the rest of the cast hated him.
A lot of people have come out of the woodwork saying they hate Chevy Chase over the years.
The group didn’t allow him to use his “notoriously awful Swami impression”. Pierce did it because he’s a narcissist and thought he knew the best way to fool General Chang.
I don’t think Pierce is a narcissist. Jeff is the narcisstist. And even if he were, NPD doesn’t make anyone racist.
I agree with you that it’s a complicated issue with no right answer and I don’t think that warrants the total destruction of the piece of media in question. And I don’t think you meant that it did either, but it seems that people think you did.
This situation reminds me of the old episodes of Mickey Mouse (Steamboat Willy? I can’t remember the exact cartoon the episodes came from, if they even came from a specific series at all and weren’t just one-offs) where Disney has a disclaimer on them if they’re ever shown anywhere about how they are for archival purposes only and that they reflect the views and culture of the time that they were made in, and how that doesn’t make those views okay. Because they’re super fuckin’ racist cartoons, like full on black people = monkeys racist, and Disney knows that that’s not okay (more like they know that showing that would lose them money at any rate), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth preserving so that we don’t lose sight of what the past actually was like and allow people to slap rose colored glasses on the “better days” or something.
As others have mentioned too, it also depends on how the depiction is used. Like when there was all that outrage over the Cyberpunk 2077 Chimaera “Mix it Up” posters of the girl with the giant “package” under her one piece. Yes, those posters are gross sexual objectification and horribly transphobic, but that’s the point. They’re intended to show how fucked up the dystopia of 2077 America is and how advertising has always used sexual objectification to sell products, and if a company thinks that using trans people’s bodies will sell a product, they absolutely will. Just like they do every year with Rainbow Capitalism during Pride.
There are times when the destruction of something horrible is absolutely the way to go, like when Germany destroyed all the Nazi statues right after WW2 and put a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust where Hitler’s bunker had been. But even then, it’s vital to preserve that past so it can’t be washed away. The Germans also took photos of the statues they destroyed, to preserve it so that something like that can’t happen again. We can’t learn from our mistakes if there’s no evidence that they even happened.
I agree that preserving the bigotries of the past to show people what they were like critically is important. Although I don’t think Cyberpunk counts in this instance. Yes, the artist who originally drew that poster had the intention of satirising the way capitalist companies use trans bodies to sell anything. The problem is, then CD Projekt Red, the capitalist company, used the poster to sell their game. They did the exact thing they were trying to satirise. At one point they held a cosplay contest, and the winner was a cis woman who stuck a glowing dildo up her pants to cosplay as the woman in that poster. And CDPR put images of her cosplay all over their twitter. A cis woman dressed up as a satire of the commodification of trans bodies to win a contest, and a company used her image to sell a video game. You can’t have effective satire while doing the very thing you “satirised”. I believe the original artist intended to satirise, but the company that owns the rights to the image just played it straight and did the horrible thing in sincerity.
That’s a great point about the poster and the contest, I’d never made that connection before. I mostly remembered the backlash targeted against the original artist of the poster and the bitter irony of the company using the poster to do the exact thing it was created to criticize. I remember the cosplay contest and thinking that that was a gross costume, but didn’t think any further about their use of the photos of a cis woman cosplaying as an over-sexualized trans woman to sell the game or anything. Just goes to show that even as a member of the targeted community, you can miss these kinds of things.
It’s great that you’re so open minded to seeing things from another perspective.
I don’t blame the artist who originally drew that poster, but I do think she could have played it smarter than to give a AAA gaming company the rights to a controversial and nuanced satire of transphobia. The result of that is kind of inevitable when you consider the capitalist context of big companies like CDPR. I totally want to see political media exploring these issues in indie games, but trusting big corporations to have a nuanced discussion of the most delicate trans issues is a bad idea. A cis woman with a glowing dildo up her pants on CDPR’s Twitter was kind of inevitable
Yes this is a real concern, this is called “cultural genocide” or destruction and is the kind of thing that expressive regimes do to their history or culture in order to mold generations of people to their desire… I wonder what’s going on with the world right now.
Cultural genocide involves the eradication and destruction of cultural artifacts, such as books, artworks, and structures.[5]
The phrase “cultural destruction” refers to an incidence of a culture being seriously damaged or destroyed as a result of external or internal forces. Cultural destruction was a common feature of the colonial era and the conquest of the Americas.
Removing an episode for being racist (even though this one wasn’t racist) is not cultural genocide. Wearing blackface (I know, this wasn’t blackface) is not a culture that needs to be preserved.
Our mistakes as a culture absolutely need to be preserved in order to prevent history from repeating itself long after the people making said mistakes have passed on.
Not every part of preservation should be a celebration of the past. It is as vitally important that we learn the things we did wrong as well as right.
Just do what WB did and add a slide saying that these were products of their time and that we know better today.
Yes it is, you’re destroying culture. And it isn’t only one episode or one tv show, there are countless reports on episodes and movies that are suddenly missing parts, episodes etc because it “hurts” someone. Let alone “politically correct” remakes from Disney. How come you don’t see this is what China and others do with imported media?
That’s another good post, thanks for sharing
Basically all historical documents are copies of original. Including the Bible lmao.
While I agree that piracy can be preservation of media, it’s most often not the case.
Streaming torrents directly or through real-debrid doesn’t help preserve media at all. Leeching only without keeping torrents alive also doesn’t keep media accessible.
Some people might store media for a few decades and then reupload, but most people never create new torrents.
I’d say the pirates who help preserve media are a small subset of pirates.
read OP’s post. if it not were for privacy in the first place and people ripping media, there wouldn’t be any copy left of those shows.
Of course not all pirates archive, but there’s an important percentage that do. Non-pirates are running out of options because each year less and less audiovisual productions release as physical media (old DVDs, more recently blue rays) and are only available through a subscription model where you do not own the actual content.
So piracy is pretty much the only route available to archive a lot of content.
You’re right, piracy is often the only way to archive media. Many releases aren’t available on BluRay in all regions. It’s thanks to those people who go through the trouble and rip media.
I meant to comment above on how not all piracy helps preserve media.
There’s all the remasters and tweaks as well. Star Wars is the obvious example, but even things like Red Dwarf got messed with with awful looking CGI plastered in.
At least they realised Red Dwarf tinkering was a bad idea and the originals still safely exist. I think they said they used the original negatives for Star Wars which were spliced and used for the Special Editions. They kept telling the public the original negatives for untouched Star Wars no longer exist. I can’t believe that’s true though. George keeps a copy of everything. There even a cut of Star Wars that used rear screen protection instead of blue screen!
The 4k77 guys pretty much provided what fans have been asking for. Lucas had his chance and chose to charge the fans for something they didn’t ask for.
Odds are George personally owns the originals and was able to retain them as part of the terms of the sale to Disney.
He doesn’t want them to be released and this is how he prevents it
Reminds me of Fraggle Rock. Due to the television station that produced the show being taken over many times over the years, most of the original broadcast masters have been lost. I think all episodes have been found but they’re mostly at home VHS recordings.
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Oh wow. I’ve never even heard of that show. I chose Doctor Who for my post because of it’s cultural influence and because I love the show, but it’s just crazy to think how much more lesser known media gets lost the same way
I don’t see any evidence supporting this, but I also don’t recall ever seeing reruns in the US.
I forgot to mention, this was specifically relevant to the UK version of Fraggle Rock as each country has different wraparounds.
The British inserts were filmed first at the TVS Television Theatre in Gillingham, Kent, and later at their larger studio complex in Maidstone (the former since closed and demolished) and presents Fraggle Rock as a rock-filled sea island with a lighthouse. Exterior footage was that of St Anthony’s Lighthouse located near Falmouth in Cornwall. The lighthouse keeper is The Captain (played by Fulton Mackay), a retired sailor who lives with his faithful dog Sprocket. In the third season, as MacKay had died in 1987, the role was played by John Gordon Sinclair as P.K., (the Captain’s nephew) and in the fourth and final season by Simon O’Brien as B.J. (son of the lighthouse’s owner, Mr. Bertwhistle). In 2014, 35 of these British wraparounds were still missing, believed wiped, although subsequent recoveries have gradually reduced this number.[7] As of December 2020, all 96 wraparounds have been found and handed over to the BFI, confirming that the entire UK production still exists in some shape or form.[8] Nickelodeon repeated it in the UK from 1993, as did Boomerang and Cartoonito in 2007. The episodes shown were the original North American versions.
I had the brilliant idea the other day of passing an amendment to the copywrite laws to include “independent distributors” for media that is abandoned or removed from active sale/distribution by its copywrite holder. The stipulation is that “independent distributors” are not allowed to make money in any way from the provided service and if the holder wants to rerelease something or remake it, the ID has to pull that title until the holder pulls it from circulation again. I would also put the stipulation on holders that any release has to be materially similar and at a fair market price. They are not allowed to re-release a game from 30 years ago at full modern retail, remakes have to be the same game to count (FFVII:remake would not count, but the updated PC releases of FFVII would), and the sales must be readily available to all citizens in the country (so releasing something on your JP store exclusively does not preclude the independent distribution in the states).
The concept is exactly this. Legalize the preservation of media and art for future generations and allow free access to it, something akin to a digital online museum of games, movies, television shows, and commercials. If a content owner is not willing to make money from it, then there can be no damages.
My mans… you just described GOG.
I hadn’t ever checked out GOG. Cool stuff, but looking at their free stuff, I beg to differ on your interpretation. I am describing the legalization of the distribution of ROMs, movies/tv shows that are either unairing or undistributed in modern formats, or package software that is either abandoned or has had support dropped for it. Essentially, being able to get a copy of Windows 95 or an old version of Photoshop.
Also, GOG looks to primarily be a storefront for game sales, not a free-access repository. The major stipulation in my idea is that the “independent distributor” is not allowed to profit from the content. So no selling it. It has to be done entirely at their own expense.
This is extremely common with media that is seen as “artless” mass market as well. Dr. Who was pulp and not deemed worth preserving.
Another example is the show that made me get into model making: Art Attack. A disney show made in the UK that was never collected or released in the original version.
There are some torrents of the Hindi version apparently, but that’s all.
Oh true.
Art attack was also shown in Australia in the 90s. Surely there must be some copies somewhere. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking
Canadian here, we also had it. Hopefully someone has it recorded.
There are tons of full episodes of Art Attack on Youtube. Not sure if it’s every episode, but they are digital rips, not VHS quality
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Usenet is worth it. More selection, no hoping that someone is out there seeding, and the quality is almost always much better.
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Newsgroups are bloody horrific unless you are picking things up the very second that they’re released.
Everything gets DMCA takedown strikes extremely quickly and goes missing. You might get lucky and put it together with repair files etc but I have all but given up on it. You need a lightning fast connection and radarr/ sonarr set up to grab things you MIGHT be interested in automatically or it’s a total wash.
The mule may be a ghost town, but Soulseek is still alive and well
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I do hope that the new torrent protocol will help with that, especially for “compilations of stuff” (e.g series, episodes, starring XYZ, …): as I understand it, seeding will become a global file-level thing that can cross torrent boundaries. The new trend of seeding and referencing over I2P might help with keeping the old stuff afloat too.
Head to 4chan: /r/ Requests and /t/ Torrents. Good magnet link trade there.
Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker’s logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.
That is hilarious
Oh wow I didn’t know that. That’s both sad and hilarious that they used a pirated version
Thanks for adding the link.
