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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

IMO, this is fine. The original isn't gone, it's just been improved. The original artist's intent isn't sacrosanct. It arguably isn't even relevant. Certainly not to a for-profit media company that owns the rights. As someone who remembers watching Do The Right Thing on basic cable with all the curses dubbed with grade-school profanity, this isn't a new thing at all. It just makes it accessible to wider audience.

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“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

This isn't history. It isn't a record. It's fiction. Entertainment. Anything to make it more entertaining makes it better.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is certainly entertaining, and I’m happy that some people enjoyed coming up with it and others enjoyed watching or reading it, but if it replaced Pride and Prejudice, the world would be worse off.

> it's just been improved

This is a debatable statement. Personally I want to see the original artist's intent, warts and all. It gives insight into the cultural sensitivities, or lack thereof, of an era before I was born.

If you bought the original on iTunes you’ll find it actually has been replaced, after the fact, with this version.

> If you bought the original on iTunes you’ll find it actually has been replaced, after the fact, with this version.

"The Cloud" is the perfected version of the memory hole. If everything's streamed, they'll be nothing to compare the edited version to, and these kinds of edits are always done sneakily. The only thing that could tell you something is wrong is a gas-lit memory.

There have already been cases of details being inserted into a stream and later changed or removed for advertising purposes. The Amazon Jack Reacher series was first released around tax time and temporarily had a CG billboard for TurboTax visible in one scene.

The original will be memoryholed. This is a nice spit in the face of everybody who worked on that movie.

They're all dead, no one cares. It won't be long before no one will remember the movie at all. It's not blasphemy, it's just time.

1. It's a 70s movie, not everyone from the 70s is dead

2. Most people do care about respecting the dead. Otherwise there wouldn't be laws against desecrating graves

a person isn't their art

The director is 87 and alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Friedkin

I care even if the status of creators is undetermined. I wish all your media is thusly edited, please never leave your bubble

I too wish all my media is thusly edited, that's why it's licensed under creative commons.

You want to ensure you have no legacy? put it all in a vault and demand no one alters it.

It's not "just time". It's the nature of copyright in its current form as well as a certain set of cultural values embraced by those overly empowered by excessive copyright protection. And these things can be changed by society, if we will it. They're not universal constants.

I think there are good arguments against redoing films like this, but this isn't one of them? If "we" actually cared about "people who make films," we'd be doing more to ensure their integrity, livelihood etc. No writers strikes, et al.

We spit in the face of most movie makers. There's an entire industry based on face-spitting. We're under no obligation to them. A lot of forgotten films were brought out of obscurity by Mystery Science Theater/Rifftrax.

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