HBO Max is failing the classic Tom and Jerry
medium.com
medium.com
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 platforms. (Offline-only distribution would count as “abandoned” in this regime.)
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 disobedience. Being punished is a sine qua non of non-violent protest methods as pioneered by MLK, Ghandi, and Mandela. (Notably, all of whom started out believing in the necessity for violent protest, AFAIU.) If there was never any serious threat of punishment, especially for protesters (as opposed to authorities just letting it slide, and then reintroducing enforcement later) then we might still have many of the laws and norms the Civil Rights movement was working to rescind and change. It's difficult to convince people to change unjust laws; much easier to convince them to change unjust consequences.
In a way it comes back to what Socrates taught: you can't reasonably expect to make effectual changes in the law or politics without subjecting yourself to the consequences. And if you're a citizen, making effectual changes is an obligation.
The self-righteous justification for surreptitiously violating copyright as some sort of protest really bothers me. I'm not going to claim that I haven't ever knowingly violated copyright, and I certainly am not going to defend our overbroad copyright protections, but I'm not going to delude myself about why I'm doing something--purely out of self-interest. Doing something out of self-interest isn't per se unethical, but there is something dissonant when you do it knowing that you're technically violating a law that should be changed, and would be more likely to be changed, if everybody felt the pain, either through strict adherence to the law or open violation and consequent 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 might simply not withhold those catalogues anymore. It's quite easy to come up with thought experiments in which your claim is incorrect.
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.
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.
Let's say I author a book and sell it as a paperback, but decide for whatever reason that I don't want to sell an e-book. Would you apply the same reasoning there? Is it ethical for you to torrent an unpaid for e-book copy because you've decided that's more convenient for you?
I'd personally argue that it's not. However if you previously paid for the book and you want to read it on your kindle and i don't offer an ebook, that would be different in my mind. Same thing if you purchased the Tom and Jerry's DVDs and decided you prefer to stream.
But thats beside the point, I don't care much about it. I am adult, I earn money and at this point in my life my time IS worth money.
If the effort/cost of watching a show it greater than firing up torrents, I will fire up torrents.
Its not like pirating a show is free, there are hidden 'costs' involved (time == money). You have to manually track episodes you watch, and if interrupted, where you stopped mid episode. You have to get the right version/quality etc etc... All of it is some effort that you have to put in.
When you are young or dont have much spare cash, that cost feels much smaller.
Watching via Netflix et al. have none of those inconvenience 'costs'.
Start netflix -> continue watching. Done. I am now watch it.
However the moment that actual subscription costs and hassle of managing subscriptions exceedes 'cost of inconvinience' of piracy. I will pirate it. If I want to watch show X and netfix have only season 1-5 in EU and 1-7 in US, i will pirate it. I pay for netflix and I pirate its shows cuz for some reason even tho EU pays more for Netflix subscriptions we get reduced catalog!
I am not sure why this seems so hard for business people to understand. You will never get all people to pay for the 'digital goods'. And thats ok.
But the moment that you start throwing obstacles in the way of people willing to pay... well, thats just pushing your customers into BitTorrent arms.
I myself only use Netflix at the moment, I am not going to buy disney+ just to watch mandalorian.
Ethical/lawful or not, I don't care. I am a customer, you make an effort.
Parody? I'm not sure.
Seems like an attitude I'm relatively happy isn't super common in society.
If I make a book, I don't "owe you an effort" just cause you don't want to make it available in a format you'd like to consume.
And that doesn't give you the right to steal it from me.
Now certainly everyone should live under a set of guidelines, no one should be certain efforts that do need to be made, say for accessibility reasons, and we do that as a society for a common good.
But if you want to use Betamax and it's going to be expensive for me to support it, I don't owe you that. And it doesn't make it okay for you to just take my work because you will only use your own format.
Edit: Also... small creators things get stolen constantly on the internet. It's a big problem for a lot of content creators and probably discourages people from making more art.
Of course you don't.
> And that doesn't give you the right to steal it from me.
First of all I am not stealing, you haven't lost anything. Secondly you not making effort to distribute your book means you don't care too much about selling your book now do you?
Anyhow, that's comparing apples to oranges. I support indie devs/book writers/music because I directly support the creator(s).
This whole situation is bit different when we are talking about pirating a movie that made $1b in profits.
> But if you want to use Betamax and it's going to be expensive for me to support it, I don't owe you that. And it doesn't make it okay for you to just take my work because you will only use your own format.
But that completely not my argument. I want to have an easy access to what you make. If you only sell your book after I install an ad plugin into my browser then fuck you. If i care about reading it I will pirate.
This is a case of an author actively working against access to the product for no reason. And the author is a multinational corporation raking in profits.
So in the future when he provides you with the format you pirated you will purchase it? Despite having pirated it before?
I bought a games that I pirated in the past.
I am not saying piracy is great everyone should be doing it.
My argument is: I am sometimes lazy and tired after a long day. I want to watch a movie i heard was good. I can spend 15 mins trying to figure out where to watch it or I can pirate it after it doesnt come up in netflix search.
but i am not going to pay for 10 subscriptions just soo I can occasionally watch a show.
Almost any movie you care about will be available on iTunes and/or Amazon Video to rent or buy. Do you check those too or is that too much work?
Ultimately, your attitude comes off as entitled. If everything you w
Any to consume isn’t available as part of one convince the subscription you rather pirate it. That devalues creation. It’s unreasonable to expect all TV and movies ever created to be available for $20/month.
But yes, if you think you can keep things off the internet just because you said so, you've signed up for a hopeless battle. It is up to IP holders to make good choices regarding making their content available conveniently at a fair price. If not, they've made their bed and have to lie in it.
I admitted my reasoning is not moralistically ethical or law abiding.
My argument is that piracy is there for a reason. There was a huge dip in torrent usage at the dawn of Netflix, for a reason. The convenience of Netflix outweighed 'cost' of piracy. Now piracy is back up, why?
Thats the reality of the world we are living in.
The argument you linked is great and it makes sense. And shows issues with copyright etc. that is my long time belief.
But the reality is that I pirate things when its more convenient to me. As a lot of people too. Saying otherwise is lying. And arguing how CP is bad and damaging doesn't change anything, because disney and company will uphold it no matter what.
For example, if instead of piracy we were talking about stealing from a brick and mortar store it wouldn't be right to do it just because it's possible and easy to get away with it (or because the store didn't provide convenient service, etc.). File sharing is different for lots of reasons (digital goods are non-rival, the issue with copyright I mention in my comment) and it's those reasons that make the argument compelling (basically that modern copyright law is itself bad).
I think just saying it's okay because you don't care about corporate profit actually weakens the ability to persuade people with the underlying arguments which I think are good and I don't think it's an ethical position that really holds up. Thoughtful people that see only those arguments (or worse 'information wants to be free') come away with a stronger defense of existing copyright law.
I do think that companies should take it into account for pragmatic reasons and recognize that it's the real competition to not delivering high quality convenient service, but that's largely because it's not possible to enforce actual copyright law with the internet at scale - which is somewhat of a different issue.
I don't think it's really hi-jacking the thread because I think the issue is so tightly coupled. I just didn't want to copy/paste my comment because that seemed like bad etiquette?
But we are not. That's shifting goalposts fallacy.
What about buying used DVD is that piracy? After all two parties watch a movie but movie maker made one sale?
> I think just saying it's okay because you don't care about corporate profit actually weakens the ability to persuade people with the underlying arguments which I think are good and I don't think it's an ethical position that really holds up. Thoughtful people that see only those arguments (or worse 'information wants to be free') come away with a stronger defense of existing copyright law.
That is why the very first line I am admitting that my position is out of pure lazyness calculation.
> I do think that companies should take it into account for pragmatic reasons and recognize that it's the real competition to not delivering high quality convenient service, but that's largely because it's not possible to enforce actual copyright law with the internet at scale - which is somewhat of a different issue.
I am of belief that piracy is great equalizer. A force that curbs infinite appetite of corporate overlord that would bleed us dry if they could. It makes particularly movie industry more customer friendly and more competitive.
> I don't think it's really hi-jacking the thread because I think the issue is so tightly coupled. I just didn't want to copy/paste my comment because that seemed like bad etiquette?
Actually it was hi-jacking. Imagine two people talk and you overhead them you cut in. Completely disregarding the actual discussion and drop your opinion in without addressing what was previously said.
Sure you could have dropped in that, but at least address why you think that is better argument and why you disagree with previous post. That is called a discussion and not stating your opinion. Hope that it make sense.
I address this in the next sentence.
> "That is why the very first line I am admitting that my position is out of pure lazyness calculation."
Sure, but that doesn't make the argument good.
> "I am of belief that piracy is great equalizer. A force that curbs infinite appetite of corporate overlord that would bleed us dry if they could. It makes particularly movie industry more customer friendly and more competitive."
I don't disagree with this in a pragmatic sense, but it's just not a very good argument for why something is ethical or okay. You could make the same statement that stealing is a 'great equalizer' between the people and the 'corporate overlords'. The reason it's different for file sharing has to do with the underlying copyright issues and the law being bad.
> "Actually it was hi-jacking. Imagine two people talk and you overhead them you cut in."
I wasn't talking to you or really that interested in replying to you, I was talking to the person I replied to because I thought they'd find my argument more persuasive. On an internet forum replying to others in threads is allowed. By linking to the other thread rather than commenting I was attempting to not hijack and just have the discussion related to that thread at the link instead of here.
As they'd say on reddit, "username checks out".
While I can sympathise with plenty of your points, this statement is a huge red flag regarding your general attitude to the world. You're marking yourself as someone I don't think I'd care to do business with, or to have as a friend. (Not that I expect that matters to you. Just an observation.)
While these are, indeed, shorts featuring a cartoon mouse, I would guess that "mouse company" is intended to refer to Disney, which is not, in fact, involved in this particular back-catalog streaming fiasco.
1 - You already forfeited you digital sales because you decided not to have an ebook release. If you make public that there are no plans for a digital release, and not the case that's just delayed compared to print.
2 - Digital books tend to be cheaper. Makes a huge difference for people that read 10 books a month.
3 - Print takes space, which many people might not have. I'm not going to buy a print book at a higher price, just to have to go straight to a used book store and sell it there, so I can torrent the ebook - which would be illegal anyway.
Same goes for TV shows and movies. Having dozens of blu-ray+dvd combos is not feasible.
Growing in up in Brazil though, didn't have much luck at that time, finding things that I wanted.
Edit: this was for books in Brazilian Portuguese. When I started focusing on books in English - to prepare to move to Canada - I bought Kindle books because otherwise, I would have to pay for international shipping, buy for high price in a Brazilian bookseller, wait up to 2 months for bookdepository delivery...
If I want readers to experience the size, weight, texture and smell as integral parts of the book, it should be my right to prevent others from putting my name on lesser experiences.
In the case of online streaming, its clear that the rightsholders are consolidated and engaged in monopolistic, anti-consumer behavior. Piracy is a natural response to that type of behavior, so is it really wrong for consumers to fight back?
Whenever you create a work of art, or work of intellect, you are using the work of "someone else". The vast majority of stories, for instance, use plot devices and elements invented by other humans. IP laws don't necessarily protect these elements - to a large extent because they can't in practice - but they are used nonetheless without special consideration to "someone else's" labor (the inventor of such elements/plot devices).
Many of the arguments for extremely strong IP protections ignore that an enormous percentage of IP is acquired from elsewhere. While many authors add much value on top of these existing elements, we still have the problem of the appropriation of such elements without any authorization/compensation.
Just because the law protects YOUR additions to the (unprotected) work of others, don't think that your additions are that special. The protections from the law, including extent, duration and penalties are arbitrary and, as I said, not part of nature.
People do work based on ideas that are in the public domain. But the differentiation of public domain and non public domain is also a human creation. Why can't IP go into the public domain 15 minutes after they are created? The protection duration is arbitrary and in practice decided by large business lobbies (just see how they increased over time to the current unreasonable levels).
So while a lot of what is being discussed is indeed ILLEGAL, it doesn't mean that it is IMMORAL. I recommend that advocates for strong IP protections examine how much of what they are trying to protect is, indeed, uniquely theirs and not traceable to previous work.
I'm not particularly interested in convincing anyone, just to share a perspective that others might find useful in their own thought process, so here it goes...
The problem of the derivative nature of IP protection is that much of the discussion of IP rights revolves around the full ownership of what's being protected. I say that you can't copy this book, or translate it to Braille because I own it. What I'm arguing is that when someone claims there is a body of thoughts to be protected, they are actually arguing for the protection of a really small percentage of it - because the rest isn't really theirs, it was not transferred to them willingly and is just being freely acquired with no consultation of the original owners of the derivative portion. You wrote this book, but most of it actually came from somewhere else.
So they are then charging for this "delta" which they "added" and trying to negotiate a market price for it. Well, if we were to allow that, we should also allow all derivative work and let the market judge the value of the "delta". For instance, can I now create a "Revengers" group of Superheroes that are just like the Avengers, but with tweaked uniforms? (Hint: NO) Then the public can judge whether my uniforms are better and pay me accordingly.
But then a judge will say that my addition isn't "enough" or "substantial". Very subjective, isn't it? Law is subjective and we built a useful legal system around it, so it's ok to say that these compromises are needed for society to work. But having to compromise to create A system doesn't mean that the compromise is the right one.
There is an illusion that we can clearly identify the origin of all protected original, derivative elements in a work of art, point to their owners and compensate them. And we think that we are actually compensating these people. We are not.
There is a large body of precedent and very subjective opinions about all of this. But strong, long IP protection proponents are claiming higher moral ground on these fairly weak subjective options. So sure, say that it's ILLEGAL to copy stuff, but don't come and say that it's IMMORAL to break such laws as they are written and that breaking these laws equate to communism.
So about tangible property... Let's set aside whether I can create a copy of tangible property (this is IP rights again) and just focus on the ownership itself.
When you buy a lawnmower, there is a very clear, and easy to track chain of ownership of all the components of this lawnmower. The blade was purchased from X, who bought the metal from Y, who paid Z to mine it. The screws, case, box. The property rights of everything in the lawnmower, save the IP, are fully respected due to the clarity of origin of all components that make it. So it's not possible, as I can do with IP, to claim that it's hard to identify the ownership of all parts or that we are applying different standards to the compensation of the owners of these parts.
I think you can see how that affects the inheriting property example. All voluntary, all parts and origins clearly identifiable. When you inherit land/house, someone who fully owns was ok with that (otherwise, at least in the US, they would have written a will to the contrary).
We have a great system to tracing physical property, and its parts, to their owners and compensating them. Same doesn't exist (and CAN'T exist) for IP. Because, duh, IP and physical property aren't the same thing and we should stop trying to put them in the same bag to begin with ("copying a movie is like stealing from the store" as some say)
Maybe if you were smarter businessman I would buy it off you instead. But my other option is to get a copy for the 'internet'.
Overall I don't think that we would be significantly worse off, especially now, when it's technically possible for general public to engage in croudfunding.
As for the big tech firms - why wouldn't they exist? Would Google be disrupted if tomorrow all patents in the world became unenforceable? Or Amazon? Sure, MS might be in trouble, but what they are doing already feels like a gradual switch to a service/subscription based model.
> While there has never been a complete Hanna-Barbera DVD collection courtesy of Warner Bros. in the US, both the Gene Deitch and Chuck Jones shorts have had complete DVD releases. In addition, the whole Deitch collection shows up on the other Warner streaming app, Boomerang. Because of this, it is baffling that HBO Max does not provide a complete collection of any one era, despite drawing on all three.
(emphasis mine)
EDIT - I forgot to get to my point, which is that I have no ethical issue with "pirating" content in a better format if the creator (or rights-holder) has decided to only make it available in worse formats. If I want to feel better about supporting the creator, I can buy the worse format before doing that, but then buying a paperback that I don't want feels unethical for other (environmental) reasons.
If someone subscribes to HBO Max for a month and then watches a better pirated copy, I have a hard time finding a problem with anyone but HBO there. If anything, paying HBO for their screwed up version is an issue because it encourages them to keep screwing things up like that.
There isn't one and never has been :)
Copyright is often closely tied with the broader concept of authors' rights in European law. An author's work is closely tied to their reputation. Therefore, the author has an inherent right to some degree of control over how their work is exhibited or distributed, because their reputation could be harmed if the work was presented in the wrong way.
Just because these rights are not explicitly recognized by U.S. law doesn't mean they're not moral rights.
I'd first like to have the discussion about the ethics of the current decades long copyright laws that are creating artificial monopolies and a really crooked supply and demand market.
Pretty flimsy, imo.
Something that was pirated does NOT equal a lost sale.
I might enjoy Charlie Chaplin films, I would never pay for the ability to watch them. I don't feel it is worth my money. It doesn't matter if it becomes available at some-point in the future, I won't ever pay for it. If anti-piracy measures were 100% effective and reasonable and I couldn't get a copy of his material without paying for it. I will never pay for it.
There are a lot of reasons that pirates use to justify their actions; some can be agreed with, others are self-serving rhetoric.
Another good example of this "Piracy does not equal lost revenue"; music.
Terrestrial radio stations do not pay for the music that they play (unlike internet based streaming services). *[edit: Another HN'er has corrected me, but they do pay a fee to the songwriter] So if I had the ability to hear the song on the radio, the artist did not receive a penny from my listening. They can continue to not receive any money if I play an .mp3 of the same song.
IIRC this is actually why Spotify’s T&Cs don’t allow usage for businesses or public gatherings because they don’t pay out at the public performance licensing rate.
This is a common argument, but I think it's more complicated than a blanket yes or no.
If I sell 1000 copies of a novel (or a CD or a movie or whatever), then strictly speaking, my revenue isn't affected by how many pirated copies exist. I get paid for 1000 copies whether there are zero pirated copies or a million.
However, that doesn't mean pirated copies aren't lost revenue in a real sense; it just means it's effectively impossible to measure that lost revenue. Some of those people would never have paid for their copy at all; some might not have even been able to find it legally. Some, though, undoubtedly did have the money and did enjoy the work, they just decided it was cheaper not to pay for it. If enough people take that route, it does affect my revenue, in that I am making less than I would if those people were paying.
And it's easy to talk ourselves into believing that's always okay, with what you called self-serving rhetoric: "really, this just hurts big companies, not little ones or individual creators"; "oh, there are enough other people paying for it, we can afford it"; "I enjoy this, just not enough to pay for it." When we're talking specifically about Charlie Chaplin, that latter seems like a pretty easy call, since the vast majority of his filmography is over 70 years old and much of it is in the public domain. If, however, we say "I might enjoy Robert Downey Jr. films, but I would never pay for the ability to watch them," this may not seem so cut and tried.
I wish we had a better term than "intellectual property", because I genuinely think "property" makes people focus on physical representation as the thing they are paying for: shoplifting a DVD and pirating a movie are obviously different, and many people who've done the latter would never think of doing the former. But in both cases, what you're really interested in, what you're actually paying for, is the content.
I get that there's lots of gray areas: the content may not be available legally in your area; it may not legally be available at all; you may already own the movie on Blu-Ray and find it easier to download a torrent of it to make a good digital copy than to go through the hassle of ripping it. But any argument which, at the end of the day, reduces to "I wanna have this content, I just don't wanna pay for it" is, well... pretty weak.
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 the minimum necessary to incentivize people to create for the public's benefit. Originally this was 14yrs, required registration, and could be renewed once.
The intent has been twisted by those with an interest in perpetuating copyright indefinitely (rights holders). Now copyright is 70yrs after the death of the creator or 95yrs after publication for contract work. [0]
Why does someone need to be incentivized to create after they're dead? Why were these extensions retroactive since you can't incentivize someone to create something they've already created?
This has been argued in the US courts, the end result of these extensions was because each one is still for a 'limited time' they're okay - even if they're repeatedly extended at each expiration. This isn't the original intent or spirit of copyright law.
> "Pirating it now deprives the owner of some amount of ability to make money from it in the future."
The rights holders have lobbied to twist the law for their own self-interest and then play victim - I have little sympathy for that.
I think if we had something sane (5yrs, maybe special protections around certain types of adaptations, maybe longer time frame to reward authors specifically up to some dollar amount if adapted for-profit, restrictions on for-profit distribution by third parties?) the law would be more aligned with its original goals and there would be fewer issues.
Today you can't even declare something 'public domain' if you want to since copyright is reserved by default. The best you can do is license it permissively.
[0]: An aside, at one point it was until the author's death. This gave me an idea for a B-movie where a serial killer goes around taking out pop groups so their music goes into the public domain.
I would like to point out to everyone that the correct expression to use in these discussions is rights holder NOT author.
Anyone still imagining this as a fight between pirate and "author" is strongly misled. Most people will happily support the author - just look at youtube/patreon. But most are also aware that buying or pirating a book ... has very little to do with the author in either case.
If a book is only copyrighted for, say, 5 years after creation, the advances for authors will become a lot smaller.
If it turns out 5 isn't enough time to incentivize people to actually write books or make movies then maybe back to the original 14.
I don't know the specific policy answer that turns out to be enough time to keep the incentive, but I do know it isn't 95 years after the publication date or 70 years after the author's death.
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?
That means if I spend a couple years writing a book, instead of spending more time with my family or working on something else, and get hit by a car and die the day after the release... my family is left with nothing?
My incentive to create would be that my family would have some earning even after my death (if I'm older or sick, for example)
That said, you'd still have the 5yr or whatever amount of time. I don't think tying it to the life of the author makes sense. It was just an example of how the spirit of the law got twisted from 'incentive to create' to 'rights holders should profit forever from their IP'.
There’s no (and there should be no) obligation to make things available for bargain dollars. If the publisher things the movie is worth a $15 dollar purchase or $8 rental, they can charge that. It’s our right not to watch it if we don’t think it’s worth that.
In other words, there's an implicit obligation to offer consumers deals that are better than the counterfactual in which copyrights are not enforced whatsoever. Otherwise, why should we have laws that make things worse for us just so that various copyright holders can maximize the rents they extract from us via intellectual property?
I didn’t make a judgement on this but You’re right that copyright is granted by society but so are many rights, e.g. the idea that an individual can own land.
Copyright exists because we live in a capitalist society and we want creators of intellectual property to partake in this economic system. Without copyright, author would not be a profession. That is the basic reason. Everything else are trade-offs and implementation details but we should remember why copyright exists in the first place.
I'very much in favor of some ruleset that compells the rights owner to either distribute something for reasonable prices[0], or make it available for redistribution and relinquish any distribution rights to it. This should apply to physical products as well - either sell it, or give blueprints to others.
--
[0] - reasonable meaning commensurate with other products in its category, and not e.g. $1,000,000 for a movie they want to suppress.
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.
The developer builds a beautiful interface for searching, curating, and organizing media in a given genre. Everything down to the moment of streaming works as you'd expect, at which point some boring public domain content is looped for the given duration of that stream.
Users would get the benefit of having the curated data accessible through the GUI-- e.g., you could search all the Tom & Jerry cartoons, get/sort by metadata, etc. Perhaps even view a screenshot (not sure about Copyright law around that).
Fringe benefit is that this creates a reference UI against all the streaming services may be judged, and gives new users some idea of what it was like to search and use "completist" services like what.cd, etc. Not to mention how thinking about the potential existence of such services can change the options we think we have for how to spend our time-- compare writing a blog in 2021 complaining about a commercial streaming service's faults vs. "completing" some private tracker's Tom and Jerry offerings with the missing cartoons from your own collection.
There are a several longstanding open projects out there to compile metadata databases that are free to use like: https://musicbrainz.org/statistics (33 million tracks)
Music is less than 100 million items, Movies fewer than 1 million, TV somewhere in between and books are a few hundred million. I'm sure they all have mostly-complete metadata databases available already.
So the answer is basically “just empower the community to do it”.
https://archive.org/details/126BuddiesThickerThanWater1962/
Enjoy!
I'm surprised these are made available with no lock or warning...
Or people could just grow up and realize that you can't judge people who lived a hundred years ago by today's standards.
Imagine what ordinary things you do every day that people a hundred years from now will consider a social crime and want you banned or cancelled for.
Like antenna TV programming used to be - guaranteed to be inoffesive so you don't have to watch crap kids like to watch.
It’s the inevitable tension between Warner’s will to forever use this art for outright commercial purposes (i.e. sell T&J to kids) and the simple wish of academics and passionate consumers to just enjoy the art for what it is.
This is one of the "Censored 11" cartoons:
people judging and censoring content post-hoc will be one of those things, almost certainly.
> For one thing, the promise of being able to stream the ENTIRETY of the classic shorts could generate a tremendous amount of publicity for Max, in the process providing strong incentive for T&J collectors, animation fans, historians, and adults to subscribe to the new platform.
That is a very small audience compared to the very large audience of families who would be upset if the their kids auto-played into unexpected blackface.
Yes these problems can be solved with UX, yes it would be nice if we can access everything as it existed forever... But the reality is unfettered yet contextualized access to archival Tom & Jerry episodes isn't going to be high on their backlog.
For the purposes of access for historical archive purposes...why focus your complaints on streaming? Streaming is great for ease of access, cheaper price points (at least monthly), and breadth of selection. As a format, it's doesn't deliver well for archival purposes.
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.
As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform.
Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)
If algos are the tool for recommending the best version of content, the idea of 'archive' and 'preservation' of original forms falls by the wayside. The FB feed you see is different than mine, as are your Google results for the same terms. How would we deal with your Tom & Jerry or other content being different? For the most part it would just be funny quirks (like film edits for airplanes or cable TV).
This gets even crazier as contemporary tools for creation can capture and store countless takes that would usually be discarded on the cutting room floor. Now they're just waiting for an alternative cut.
I wrote about this 9(!) years ago, but the issue has only accelerated: https://dbreunig.tumblr.com/post/13923466229/multisignal-too...
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 OP and yourself are going after HBO for this, apparently Warner Bros made this decision twenty years ago.
> As far as families being upset about their kids auto-playing into offensive content, HBO has already solved for this. They have Sex and the City and The Sopranos on that platform.
Dunno if you use HBO Max or not but, like Netflix, they separate UI and content by age group of the current user
> Mark the naughty T&J episodes as "TV-MA", and a kid-filtered view won't show them, right? (I guess the question is whether they have this ability per-episode, or only at the series level)
Or just not, and not deal with any further possible ramifications. All of these "historical"/"archival purposes/I'm a sensible adult" arguments for Tom and Jerry apply just as well to Amos & Andy since we're really talking about censoring jokes about Black people's physical appearance. Almost seems like a dog whistle if I had more evidence.
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 between serving those small subsets vs. avoiding the ire of the wider subscriber base.
> Why is HBO Max responsible for all of them
I didn't say they were. Just reframing it as a business decision that they could make. The long tail is a thing that has been traditionally hard to cater to, but is easier with the technology we have today. (i.e. Physical video stores don't have 1/10th the floorspace that would be required, but online streaming does. Once a title has been tagged and categorized, you let your software take care of the curation with 0 marginal cost)
> I don't even know why OP and yourself are going after HBO for this.
I'm not "going after them". I was responding to the parent's comment with my own ideas how the situation could be navigated. If HBO decides that, no, they'd rather just sidestep the whole issue, I don't blame them! Their math might work out different than mine. (Okay, maybe I "blame" them, but I get it. Can't say I'd be Mr. Principled Archivist in the same situation)
As for OP, I figure he really loves Tom and Jerry, and would love to see all the episodes.
> Almost seems like a dog whistle if I had more evidence.
No. The "I'm a sensible adult" is fine by me on its own merits. I don't need to whistle. Like I said, mark these episodes "TV-MA".
I guess I'm frustrated because I wish streaming services weren't so ephemeral. The one that really got me was the episode of Community where the group played D&D for the first time. It's one of the best episodes of that show, but it's no longer available to watch. But it's reasonable for me—a non-bigot—to like that episode, right?
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.
Chang’s makeup is such a layered gag, it’s ridiculous that it gets dropped in the same basket as Mommy Two-Shoes.
For the last decade I've been buying up old DVDs and CDs of films and TV shows that I like from fleaBay, Goodwill, and elsewhere and archiving them in my own NAS for my personal use. It's astounding how much quality media has never made it to streaming.
In my estimation, probably 5% of what was released on DVD as ever made it to streaming services. And even then, there are huge gaps in DVDs. Probably half of VHS tapes made it to DVD.
Recently, my wife wanted to watch all the movies of an important film star (Humphrey Bogart, or someone similar), and it turns out that it's not possible. Many of the films never made it to digital (DVD or streaming), and so can never be seen by the public short of flying to a city on another continent and attending an obscure film festival.
No, I didn't. You missed the part of my comment which stated: "And even then, there are huge gaps in DVDs. Probably half of VHS tapes made it to DVD."
vs binging on Netflix, the experience has way more weird UI bugs and hangs.
Finding we're constantly restarting the app/apple tv because it keeps hanging or erroring out.
I'll be curious to see where it is 6 months or so from now.
I know I can save offline with an iPad and cast to the TV but too inconvenient. Will probably cancel soon.
I really don't expect HBO to get anything right for streaming. Even Amazon has a better video player despite some of it's own major annoyances like constantly losing focus, so you can't use the keyboard. Both Netflix and Amazon skip forward almost instantly though.
Nobody seems to censor the leprechauns or gangster characters. Disney seems to get a pass for an inventory of issues https://www.insider.com/moments-themes-in-disney-movies-that... - they would have nothing left if you filtered all their content for modern political correctness. What message does it send when Prince Charming always has to rescue the princess? And so on..
But there is the small issue of Jerry falling into a vial of shoe polish and then popping his head out -- in full blackface. Yup, that's not allowed today. I hope they just correct that (but without messing up the music) rather than outright ban it.
You don't reconcile history by pretending it didn't exist.
50 years from now, some young generation will decide that animal-sourced leather is a hate crime, and every movie you've ever seen will be banned to "correct" the social error of seeing shoes that aren't plastic.
But blackface is clearly prohibited today. So there's two choices for art like this: edit it, or it doesn't get shown publicly again. I'm only arguing that I'd prefer the former to the latter.
You don't learn from history by denying it's existence.
Either what these censored cartoons showed is somehow worse than realistic depictions of rape and torture.. or we're being inconsistent.
Or one of the shows has appeal to children as central to its market role, and the other was designed, marketed to, and always rated for adult audiences.
Put a warning label on it and people can choose to not view it.
https://i.imgur.com/X39LVNF.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Minstrel...
Incidentally, another favorite of mine from the 40s --The Spirit comics by Will Eisner-- also feature a character with the cartoon black face: huge lips, etc. Unfortunately, that limits the exposure the comics will get with modern audiences.
it's pretty fun watching jetsons and seeing how far off some of their predictions were, but then other things are spot on.
Most of the article seems devoted to 1 and focused on the 'cancel culture' reasons why HBO might not be showing the full catalog while also admitting that there is also a large amount of the catalog not on HBO that is not plausibly part of the several episodes that would be targeted for being cancelled. Seems like the premise of the article kind of falls apart at that point, a little self-refuting.
Having the Jetsons and Flintstones on streaming has been a blast for me as well.
I think the difference is that you have sat down and watched it and liked it, while the article author has done this previously and wants to again, but half is missing.
Is all the Jetsons present? Is Hanna Barbera all there?