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25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

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Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#241

Post by [deleted] »

bandrami wrote: post #227
mcmcmc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you’re entitled to other people’s work?

Because they published it; they were free not to do so if they didn't want anybody to reproduce or distribute it (in fact that seems like the easiest way to do so). In order to encourage more people to make these works, however, our government grants them a temporary, limited monopoly on the work's reproduction and distribution, but this is a means to an end that we agree to for utilitarian reasons, not some kind of…

[deleted]

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#242

Post by michaelt »

Digit-Al wrote: post #230
varunnrao wrote: post #104

What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes. It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially gi…

The worst part is that we already had a perfectly viable model: Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?" They took back the rights and started their own streaming services thinking that people would be happy to pay the same amount of money to access the tiny…

> Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?"

To be fair to the studios, sticking with Netflix would have been suicide.

Put yourself at the mercy of someone else's distribution monopoly and you end up a powerless, penniless sharecropper - like people who develop mobile apps.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#243

Post by lapcat »

dotancohen wrote: post #220
sytelus wrote: post #127

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 docu…

> 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.

> Rust In Peace was completely rerecorded by studio musicians

Are you talking about the 1990 Megadeth album?

In 2004 it was remastered, as a lot of albums are, but it was not rerecorded by studio musicians.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#244

Post by donatj »

Just burning goodwill like cordwood. I'm starting to believe they don't have a single person on staff who understands customer relations - or even that they have customers in need of pleasing. They seem like a faceless entity with impenetrable goals.

Honestly, I'm still reeling from the cancellation of Tosh.0. It makes zero sense from the outside looking in. It was their second most popular show after "South Park", cost peanuts to make, and had been renewed for another four seasons. They ended up breaking the contract, which presumably cost them nearly as much as just producing the show would have

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#245

Post by amanaplanacanal »

eru wrote: post #198
Y_Y wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

> 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?

This has all been solved for music with compulsory licensing, so I assume we could solve it for video too.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#246

Post by michaelt »

ncallaway wrote: post #217
mcmcmc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you’re entitled to other people’s work?

That’s the basic premise of copyright laws. It’s a trade. The default state of affairs is no copyright protection . Society has decided to trade a limited duration monopoly on the copyright of the work, in order to promote more works being created so that we have more works in the public domain . The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain. So, when the current copyright system fails to…

> The entire purpose of copyright is to generate works for the public domain.

Is it? Or do we just think on average, producing more copyrighted works adds to the greatness and happiness of our society?

The writing of Harry Potter has brought joy to hundreds of millions of people. The production of a renowned textbook like SICP helps educate an entire generation of professionals and raise the nation's productivity.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#247

Post by defrost »

autoexec wrote: post #102
defrost wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stable, Horse, bolted ... Other content lost in the purge were clips and full episodes of other short-lived late-night entries like The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the Chris Hardwick-hosted @midnight (predecessor to After Midnight), and Lights Out with David Spade. To quote Life of Brian "I know where to get it if you want it" ... these shows were archived as they aired.

I imagine that finding copies of much of that will be difficult. I know someone who took to the high seas for episodes of the Colbert Report, but how many people are still seeding full seasons of that, let alone shows like Lights Out which were nowhere near as popular.

There are still private trackers going on two decades old now with packrat members who have home NAS systems with everything they've ever watched saved away and shared on request with other members in good standing .. less high seas piracy, more community of collectors with digital VHS tapes.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

SarahC_ wrote: post #156

It is clear now that paper archives are far superior to digital ones. Digital archives don't degrade over time - but they are so easy to destroy. Unplug the disks, or hit "Erase", or take the site down - and history has been erased. We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.

> We'll know more about the 19th century than we ever will of the 21st century.

With digitization, we're losing a lot of documents from before 20th century as well, thanks to people who figure that digital scans are cheaper to keep than the paper originals, or worse, who also think someone else already digitized them (they didn't, because they also thought the same).

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#249

Post by robertlagrant »

bandrami wrote: post #223
onion2k wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#250

Post by leni536 »

reaperman wrote: post #206
leni536 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? For single player games you can just still use and distribute the original, unpatched version. I agree that there is lock-in with online multiplayer games, but it's more on the game servers than the distributed content. So it's only marginally a copyright issue.

I think the person above you meant “If the copyright clock for the original release keeps getting reset every time an update drops…” and you’re talking about “If each updated version gets its own copyright clock upon release”. Copyright (and patent) law generally follows the latter in western nations, but there’s nuance because third-party derivative works can easily contain elements which the original IP owners migh…

You make good arguments about derivative works on public domain works, where some other derivative works are still in copyright. That's probably difficult to maneuver legally.

However if the goal is to just distribute the original public domain work legally, then that's easy and convenient. That alone would be hugely beneficial for games.

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