11–20 of 158 posts
Canada spent years digitizing classic TV and published the shows on a Youtube channel, then suddenly deleted all the content without notice to archivers, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982.
In the absence of social contracts for preservation, we are left with defensive archiving.
The easiest solution would be to send them anonymously to a third party abroad, who'd then proceed to digitise the tapes, returning the originals to the collectors, and hand the resulting files to the BBC. Setting up a trustable network of anonymous relays crossing jurisdictions for physical goods is the hard part, and tends to attract the wrong kind of attention to the ones involved.
I'm such a third party, could do it. I could't care less about restoring BBC history if BBC themselves don't care enough to lay down a legal way for this to happen without my help.
Preservers of cultural memory should be rewarded. Canada spent years digitizing classic TV and published the shows on a Youtube channel, then suddenly deleted all the content without notice to archivers, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982 . In the absence of social contracts for preservation, we are left with defensive archiving.
The UK is unusual in that it has no statute of limitations for most crimes besides "summary offenses" (equivalent to US misdemeanors): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_periods_in_the_Unit...
Why is the BBC being weird about it?
The easiest solution would be to send them anonymously to a third party abroad, who'd then proceed to digitise the tapes, returning the originals to the collectors, and hand the resulting files to the BBC. Setting up a trustable network of anonymous relays crossing jurisdictions for physical goods is the hard part, and tends to attract the wrong kind of attention to the ones involved.
That doesn't meet the goal of amnesty.
Before the footage is made available, the people holding that footage have leverage.
Once they share it somehow, the leverage is gone and it's unlikely that they'd be given amnesty. In fact, the act of sharing the footage has some nonzero chance of revealing people . . .
The easiest solution would be to send them anonymously to a third party abroad, who'd then proceed to digitise the tapes, returning the originals to the collectors, and hand the resulting files to the BBC. Setting up a trustable network of anonymous relays crossing jurisdictions for physical goods is the hard part, and tends to attract the wrong kind of attention to the ones involved.
Why is the BBC being weird about it?
There have been a lot of attempts to extort money out of the BBC by people falsely claiming that they have lost episodes over the years, they may simply not believe these claims are as credible as the article suggests.
The easiest solution would be to send them anonymously to a third party abroad, who'd then proceed to digitise the tapes, returning the originals to the collectors, and hand the resulting files to the BBC. Setting up a trustable network of anonymous relays crossing jurisdictions for physical goods is the hard part, and tends to attract the wrong kind of attention to the ones involved.