Guys - you can get all 161 episodes (6.23GB and v.slow download) here: https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/ Enjoy!
The amount of people seeding the archive.org torrent has spiked since you posted this comment
HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
131–140 of 153 posts
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purely devil's advocate would be someone along the lines of -- just because it isn't for sale now doesn't mean it might never be. Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future. Pretty flimsy, imo.
This is hard to get into without context. Copyright (and patents) exist "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The purpose is to promote the progress of science and useful arts for the public's benefit, the means is a limited time monopoly. The limited time rights are intended to be…
This is a good point and worthy some thought. Let's say that Congress passes another extension of copyright the day before a certain work is to enter the public domain. Is it then unethical to pirate it the next day? What if it didn't pass? Is it unethical to make use of the work the next day without paying the owners of the IP? Why? What's the true difference?
If this line of reasoning makes sense, then when is it unethical to pirate works? Until the copyright goes out? Until the original authors die? Until the original authors' heirs die? Until 14 + 14 years have passed (original extended copyright length)? Or is it when the IP is owned by individuals and not corporations?
Maybe ethics here just is a bit too complicated and it's pointless to bring it into the discussion?
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likewise, the rightsholders don't have a right to extort the public for access. Since the companies producing these works rely on the public's attention and sentiment to make money, they can't have it both ways. Either make the works available at a consistent price to all distributors of content, or accept piracy as a cost of gatekeeping.
Companies are made out of people, who have an agreement with the rights holders.
Is the implication that the public is the same thing as a narrowly interested group of people? If so, I reject.
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. Take the Civil Rights movement, for example. They disobeyed unjust laws in protest, but they succeeded in their cause because they were often punished for the disobe…
> The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. I don't understand how you can make this claim without any support. If companies believed that withholding random subsets of their collections wouldn't keep consumers from seeing them only lead them not to receive any compensation, they mig…
Because the desire most often expressed, particularly by non-corporate parties, in these debates is that the best overall outcome would be a change in the law so copyright holders didn't have the power to be so discriminatory.
Even though the debate often revolves around famous works, like Mickey Mouse, the real costs here often involve orphaned works, or works which copyright owners don't believe can be monetized but because of risk averseness and what-if fantasies of future riches won't relinquish control. If we could write legislation that allowed Disney to retain exceptional rights to their works, but rebalanced copyrights for everybody else, I think a lot of advocates would take that bargain.
But more generally it's a matter of consistency and equity and achieving a more optimal balance of rights and incentives, which absolutely does require a change in the law, especially considering that it's the law that has created these rights in the first place. And as compared to rights in real and chattel property, the justification is far more dubious and certainly the extent of the rights given far more arbitrary.
Of course there are better and worse ways to exist under a bad regime, and if the presumption is that the regime is immutable then your hypothetical is more persuasive. (Although I don't buy it--where can I legally purchase NES ROMs, or original cuts of Northern Exposure? The reality of the situation proves to me that copyright holders have unnecessarily broad rights, and that either they're not perfectly rational actors or the likelihood of the favorable hypothetical manifesting is otherwise slight and rare.) But to respond in a slightly different manner to the original question, I would ask, "would you rather have a bigger piece of a small pie, or a smaller piece of a large pie"? That's the ethical issue--that there's a better balance of copyrights such that everybody gets a bigger piece of pie in absolute terms, but we can't get there if everybody is myopically focused on the size of their piece relative to the whole pie, rather than focusing on how big the pie could be. And the issue naturally implicates tensions between selfishness and pro-social, collective behavior.
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#135Similar shenanigans are the reason I cancelled Disney+. I’ll pay a monthly fee for your entire back library. Otherwise, no thanks. Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. That way, people could legally torrent everything currently missing from these streaming platform…
> Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? The ethical issue with piracy is that you can't expect to change behaviors or the laws if you merely circumvent them, and circumvent them without substantial risk of punishment. Take the Civil Rights movement, for example. They disobeyed unjust laws in protest, but they succeeded in their cause because they were often punished for the disobe…
I’m arguing congress should change copyright law so that such surreptitious violations would not be illegal any more.
Surely, it would have been better if the civil rights movement was never necessary because decades earlier society and the government simply decided to grant equal rights because it was the right thing to do.
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I don't think that anything intangible can be property. And whenever I purchase something digital I consider the act to be a donation and/or payment for a service of delivery.
It’s an interesting attitude. Of course, if everyone thought that way most of the the things we buy digitally would never be made in the first place.
Some might consider this a benefit.
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#137Similar shenanigans are the reason I cancelled Disney+. I’ll pay a monthly fee for your entire back library. Otherwise, no thanks. Also, what’s the ethical issue with pirating content that is not for sale? I’d love to see a copyright overhaul that formalized abandonware and extended it to back catalogs of film and music. That way, people could legally torrent everything currently missing from these streaming platform…
I think the right answer, in the short term, is to go for mandatory licensing.
If you can't compete on your catalog, since everyone else can license it at a reasonable price, you have to compete on the best user experience-- discovery, performance, compatibility.
But they also can't whine "but what about the artists" because they're still getting a cheque.
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#138Guys - you can get all 161 episodes (6.23GB and v.slow download) here: https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/ Enjoy!
The amount of people seeding the archive.org torrent has spiked since you posted this comment
And I just added five new seedboxes to that list. Thank you for sharing the link!
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#139I love Tom and Jerry. Children’s cartoons are too serious these days, and many channels like cartoon network are quickly turning into political indoctrination themselves. Meanwhile these beloved classics are being suppressed in a Fahrenheit 451 manner, robbing children of the golden oldies.
Re: HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Your point is valid regarding the size of the niche here, but there are probably a thousand other niches that would combine—long tail fashion—into a good chuck of market share. What niches would those be? Why is HBO Max responsible for all of them? Their parent company made committments to censorship before HBO Max even existed back to when DVDs were being introduced, as stated in the article. I don't even know why…
> What niches would those be? I can't enumerate all niches that exist in a large back catalog of media. My point wasn't that HBO should cater to 1,000 different "I wanna see the racist stuff" niches. Rather, there are a thousand different subsets of their subscriber base that all have an outsized interest in something otherwise obscure. Or largely unpopular. I was responding the to general point about the tradeoff be…
About the D&D episode, if you watch the series on Netflix it's not just blocked or greyed out, but is simply wiped out of existence. They even renumbered the season, so there's absolutely no way for an unsuspecting viewer to know, they're simply robbed of having that choice. I myself learned about its existence long after I was done with the season, by coincidence.
In my opinion this kind of re-writing is the worst, since the platform is not only making a decision to not serve you the content, but also actively making the decision to keep this information from you.
I miss the good ol' days of "just click the X button on the top-right corner" way of content filtering.