Lost "Doctor Who" episodes found but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC | Hacker News Reader

Lost "Doctor Who" episodes found but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC

theguardian.com

342 pointswslh146 comments

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.

Why preserve what you wish not to remember.

Because someone else might want to remember

And that someone else may be future me

Because you don't create the future by destroying the past.

Maybe you don't value history, but many people do. The point isn't entertainment, or the kind of entertainment you're imagining. Of course this won't compete on the streaming market. The point is that it is a time capsule of an age we've already forgotten.

I think most people also concluded that this was statement of my personal position. It certainly is not.

Oh, just trolling then?

I believe it's called 'playing devils advocate' or in this case sarcasm.

Unfortunately sarcasm doesn't come across very well on the internet.

Did you not intend for people to conclude this to be your personal position? Because there are ways to communicate that more clearly.

Because you (making the decision) do not speak for the generations that will follow. In making that decision you are (arrogantly) assuming that you know the minds of all those that will follow and that they will agree with your assessment that "there's nothing to see here".

Perhaps you meant in the sense of a deliberate memory hole (in the Orwellian sense), in other words eliminating that which you don't want others to discover.

There's a Quebec kid tv show "Une grenade avec ca" I really liked when I was a teenager and at some point one of the main actors got prosecuted for possession of child pornography, so they pulled out all the episodes he played in... which is basically every single episode I ever watched.

I understand their decision to not air those, but it still feels like a part of my childhood got erased and I wish I could get a copy of those episodes.

https://archive.org/details/une-grenade-avec-ca-s-05-e-22-pa...

Wow, thanks!

> These collectors were seen as criminals, but now we can see they are really saviours. An amnesty would stop them being frightened of prosecution,” he said.

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...

He should give the tapes to the British museum out of spite. They BBC will never get the back and the British Museum doesn't care what crimes were committed as long as their collection grows.

Send the tapes to Greece, Egypt, Nigeria, what-have-you.

Perfect.

Is that unusual among all the countries of the world? Or is the US unusual for having a statute of limitations?

Most countries have statues of limitations for criminal offenses.

It makes sense - imagine trying to defend yourself against an case where the police has been sitting on evidence for 50 years, and anyone you could call in your defense is long-dead.

It’s not clear to me why we should have a hard and fast statute of limitations for that reason instead of simply factoring it in when deciding whether the prosecution has proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

How much doubt must a juror sow into their mind in order for it to be a fair trial?

The same could be said for any bit of courtroom procedure. Why forbid a prosecutor from making an illegal inference, or entering illegal evidence, when you can just instruct the jury after-the-fact to disregard it?

The jury doesn't just live in a vaccum. There are rules for what kind of evidence is admissible to them, and we don't just leave it to the jury to yolo it.

Sometimes, those rules don't make 100% sense. That's the case with any set of rules (Especially ones surrounding legal procedure!). We set rules, because we think that they are a good idea most of the time.

And most of the time, for most crimes, the tradeoff between trying a decades-old case, and of preventing the harassment of an innocent person over a decades-old-case leans towards the latter.

In adversarial systems, the prosecution's objective isn't to reach a truth, but instead to fight to convict you. This incentivises dirty tricks, misrepresentation of facts, and ultimately the full force of state resources looking at putting you behind bars. And during this whole process you are often locked up anyways for this process, independent of actual guilt.

In that model and imbalance of resources, having statue of limitations in place alleviates the need for defendents to, for example, keep records of their actions and reasoning for 30+ years. How would you navigate being charged for tax evasion from 35 years ago, for example?

EDIT: to be clear, I don't think this is necessarily a precise defense of statuetes of limitations specifically, just a "well they're not a bad idea" sort of defense

Amen, brother. You hit the nail on the head with this one. Going to get all the charges against me dismissed by the prosecutor tomorrow, but took ten years of being in jail, waiting for trial, before they came to that decision. The system is broken :(

Are there any examples of a country with a non-adversarial Justice model?

Most countries in Europe and Latin America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system

Inquisitorial systems (more present in civil law systems big also present in some US courts) have the judge act as a fact finder. In that model the judge is basically an active participant in figuring out what happens, instead of just being a referee in between two parties. So the judge (a professional whose job it is to do this) is more of an active participant and a determiner of guilt rather than 12 randos off the street (modulo a bunch of stuff). This leads to things like guilty plea bargains not being as much of a thing if the judge doesn’t believe the confession.

Source: I read the Wikipedia article on inquisitorial systems and watch tv. So I don’t know what I’m talking about but it sounds nice (also aligns with what I’ve heard about French court procedure) I think this covers Japan too (anyone who plays phoenix wright might wonder: why is the judge just declaring a result?)

    > In that model and imbalance
    > of resources, having statue
    > of limitations[...]

Would a statue of limitations be symbolic like the statue of liberty, or an autonomous mecha or golem serving as an independent check on state power, whose slumber you'd disturb at your peril?

Remembering that the most severe crimes usually have no statute of limitations, one strong case for having them is so people can move on from their past without fear a minor, unprosecuted crime will come back to haunt them.

It also allows the police to throw stuff out. If you want to prosecute, you need the evidence, but keeping evidence forever means litteral warehouses of evidence. It gets expensive quickly.

One argument for a statute of limitations is fading human memory, but I don't see how that's the case here, from the article:

> "Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels. [...] “The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out."

I think making this an offense is insane, but I don't see how these cases are any more ambiguous than if the same happened yesterday.

The question is whether the owner of property has a right to order its destruction, and whether an employee (or equivalent) is stealing or legitimately salvaging if they "rescue" said property from the trash.

Legal or not, the BBC obviously put a value of zero on these things when they threw them away.

So who has lost, what value needs to be recovered? There's no reasonable reason for anyone to pursue legal action, it would just be vexatious and / or a waste of tax payer money.

You don’t need a loss to occur for there to be a crime “the trump defense”

If I break into your house, eat your food, but leave money on the counter for the same value, you didn’t make a loss, but I’m sure you would want me to be arrested

Yes the crime of breaking and entering.

If I took a piece of potato peel out of your bin that was on the pavement, that might technically be a crime (I don't know). But are you going to pursue a civil suit? What compensation are you going to get?

Are the police or CPS going to prosecute? Is it in the national interest? Or are they wasting resources for no reason.

The BBC are in no way being harmed by someone who has permission to be on the premises taking something that the BBC literally believes to be rubbish.

There's a legal concept of irrationality. This would seem to be an example of that.

The loss here is the psychological impact of knowing your home has been violated, and thereby feeling less safe. Which is quite substantial for many.

> There's no reasonable reason for anyone to pursue legal action,

Yes, I agree with you, but clearly this is illegal in the UK. I'm only narrowly commenting on how in this case the passage of time doesn't seem to have impacted anyone's ability to discern the facts of the case.

> So who has lost, what value needs to be recovered?

Does there have to be loss? If you throw away a phone containing your nudes and I recover it, can I leak them? By your logic yes because nothing was lost, you didn't want them. Sometimes it's not as simple as you wanting to keep something or not, you should also have the right to decide that something you created should not exist.

If you purposefully threw away a phone that you knew had nudes on, I don't think you can complain that someone found them no.

I suppose the ultimate answer is not to leave pictures of your self nude if you don't want people finding them. I'm guessing most people wouldn't want just one random person having access to their nude photos.

I'm not sure how this example changes if you replace throwing away with selling on eBay, whereas if the BBC had sold the tapes on eBay, presumably we wouldn't be having this conversation, so the comparison is flawed.

Add complexity, I wasn't the one who threw it. Is it still yours now? Did you find a perfect loophole for privacy? "I found it on the web, they obviously didn't want it, it's mine and I'm putting it on my streaming service".

> I'm not sure how this example changes if you replace throwing away with selling on eBay, whereas if the BBC had sold the tapes on eBay, presumably we wouldn't be having this conversation

What? How is that even remotely comparable? Had they sold it obviously it changes everything. Maybe even with clauses on how it's allowed to be shared and so on.

>Add complexity...

You aren't adding complexity, you're changing the situation entirely.

The BBC threw things away. they meant to throw things away, because they didn't value them. If you throw my phone away, that doesn't mean I don't value it. If you throw a phone with nudes on, that you don't want people to see, then you obviously value your privacy and shouldn't have thrown your phone away with nudes on.

At some point you have to take responsibility for your own actions.

>What? How is that even remotely comparable? Had they sold it obviously it changes everything. Maybe even with clauses on how it's allowed to be shared and so on

My point is, if you sold a phone with nudes on you probably wouldn't want people looking at them.

So the 'morality' of that is independent of how the phone was gained.

On the other hand, if the BBC sold the tapes, there wouldn't be an issue.

So the comparison is flawed. One is an issue of how the item was obtained, one is an issue of what was on the item.

> You aren't adding complexity, you're changing the situation entirely

I'm not changing anything from the perspective of the dumpster diver, which is my point. The rest of the discussion is just you grasping at straws to make a point you're allowed to use what you found anyway you want.

The BBC not valuing them is your interpretation, they're allowed to value them being destroyed and unreleased. If someone "found" the Christine Chubbuck tapes and released them, would that also be fair game?

Who is the person to take responsibility in that case? The leaker or those who couldn't properly (according to you) dispose of the property? You're putting the responsibility on the victim.

You can't demand everyone to understand these thing, how far are you allowed to go? Restoring deleted data on a hard-drive? The intention was obviously to delete the data, but incompetent. The simplest solution is that intellectual property stays with the creator, period.

>The simplest solution is that intellectual property stays with the creator, period.

The original issue isn't one intellectual property you know. It's one of storing 'stolen' property.

I don't think I've advanced an opinion on ip.

If I throw away, sell or give away a music cd I don't think that implies that I'm giving away a license to reproduce that cd.

Your nude example, as I pointed out is an issue for just the one copy, which has nothing to do with IP rights.

In the US it’s legally clear that if it’s in the trash it’s fair game. Your employer could fire you if they catch you, but, the police for example are allowed to rummage your bin without a warrant if it’s out on the curb. And they base that on the expectation that hobos and everyone else is doing it already, so, it’s normalized here.

On the other hand an employee probably wouldn’t get the copyright etc, it’s still their intellectual property, it’s just a rare collectible item that got thrown away and is now properly recognized.

Not in Texas. Dumpster divers are usually charged with crimes here, and I think it's absurd to charge them with crimes.

"Texas. It's a whole other country."

The real question is whether or not it is legal to shoot someone looking through your trash? Sadly, I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.

Not technically, but I would not be surprised if some cops looked the other way.

> In the US it’s legally clear that if it’s in the trash it’s fair game.

That's an oversimplification, and can vary from state to state (or even city to city). In my city, the trash is in a can owned by the waste management company. As soon as it's in the can, it's considered to be owned by that company. Anyone taking things out of the cans without permission are technically stealing. Things placed next to the can (oversized items and the like) are not protected in that way.

It also matters where the cans are placed. Even in places where trash is fair game, unless it's physically in a publicly-accessible place, you're trespassing to get to it.

On the flip side, imagine someone committed one or more crimes and were only discovered decades later. Does that mean their crimes should go unpunished.

I'm not specifically arguing for or against, but I guess it's not so simple.

Sadly this article is misleading - John Franklin has issued a statement saying that he was misquoted [1] and there is actually an amnesty when handing over missing episodes.

[1] https://twitter.com/drwhopodcasters/status/17233881608669433...

FYI, archive.org has a bunch of whats been available:

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s01

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s02

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s03_v2

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s04

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s05

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s06

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s07

https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s08

Holy crap! How long has this been available? Every time I read up on it, finding it was like the thing of legends.

Those aren't lost episodes. They are available on DVD and iPlayer.

Oh, now I got it. Thank you so much for clarifying.

Thanks for this, didn't know these were out there. I started watching as a kid when Jon Pertwee was the doctor and haven't seen most of these.

As others have said this article is poorly written with the person interviewed saying he was misquoted so nothing in it can be taken as true.

However, there have been very strong rumors for years that 2-3 episodes known to be in the hands of collectors (I believe it was said in a recorded interview with the Radio Free Skaro podcast by someone involved in Classic Who bluray releases)

While some people may be worried about legal implications I suspect that most just would rather keep it. If they really wanted to return it they could hand it off to someone who would be an intermediary. So the real danger is that once they die, whoever inherits their collection may not care about it and junk the whole thing.

That makes more sense to me knowing how this happens in the arcade preservation community. Some people really get off on having 'the only copy' of something.

>>As others have said this article is poorly written with the person interviewed saying he was misquoted so nothing in it can be taken as true.

I’m not finding this claim being made elsewhere in the comments here. Do you have a link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38245171

Listening to the latest episode of Radio Free Skaro they confirm that the rumors were stated on their show and read a quote from the person interviewed for this article who says they were just repeating what they heard of Radio Free Skaro!

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.

This is how it feels to me. Dump them on a pirate site, no reason to give them to the BBC if they have no interest in trying to get them

Are we sure the copyright belongs to BBC and not the royal family?

Excuse my ignorance, but why exactly would the copyright belong to the royal family?

I don't know much either. I don't think the BBC is a government department though, but it's kind of messy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright

> The easiest solution would be to . . .

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 . . .

They wouldn’t need amnesty if they can never be identified. Also, they could return the BBCs property anonymously and release the digitised versions after that.

Surely this third party abroad will not alter stored footage with some hidden and pranky details..

I didn't know anything about this; it's quite interesting.

...the infamous arrest of comedian Bob Monkhouse in 1978 has not been forgotten, Franklin suspects: “Monkhouse was a private collector and was accused of pirating videos. He even had some of his archive seized. Sadly people still believe they could have their films confiscated.”

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20180824/282703342...

I mean, if you were in that situation would you trust the legal system not to turn on you?

Weirdly the BBC later made a TV programme about his archive (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x9b7w) and I don't recall them mentioning that he was arrested.

Seems like an article that would have been vastly improved if they had simply put the question about an amnesty directly to the BBC and printed their response.

They did. The BBC carefully avoided saying anything meaningful.

> The BBC said it was ready to talk to anyone with lost episodes. “We welcome members of the public contacting us regarding programmes they believe are lost archive recordings, and are happy to work with them to restore lost or missing programmes to the BBC archives,” it said.

> They did. The BBC carefully avoided saying anything meaningful.

I think it can be interpreted a little more charitably than that:

> We welcome members of the public contacting us regarding programmes they believe are lost archive recordings

They're literally feeding lines to potential respondents, to help them avoid implicating themselves in theft. You didn't take reels from the studio, you found "lost recordings" they were looking for.

> and are happy to work with them to restore lost or missing programmes to the BBC archives

They're doing it again here. It's not "returning shit you stole," it's "restoring lost or missing programmes." Return it as lost and stick to your story.

FWIW, here in the US "we will work with you" is the exact same verbiage we use in calls to recover lost equipment we actually need but retain discretion in litigation over.

We don't commit to promises of amnesty because sometimes it turns out you've been dumping brand-new equipment off the loading dock and selling it on eBay for years, and that's not worth looking past just for the return of one item.

But if you happen to have the one thing we're looking for and weren't misappropriating millions of dollars in assets in addition to the lost item, we just want it back and won't ask questions.

Why is the BBC being weird about it?

In the article: The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out. But if you loved film and knew it would be important one day, what did you do? So what we need now is an amnesty,” he said.

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.

That doesn't make any sense. OP is about reports that BBC refuses to make any legal promises and talk only vaguely about cooperating with owners, when it would be so easy for them to simply publicly promise to not prosecute material stole before, say, 1990. Obviously, granting 'an amnesty for stolen episodes' is even easier for fake episodes which were never stolen in the first place... The credibility of the claims is irrelevant.

The BBC does not have any discretion over who is prosecuted for a crime though. They can give their opinion but it's up to the police. So a public promise doesn't actually hold any weight.

Someone would have to tell the police about it though.

They don’t? In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something.

Is that not the case in the UK? Can you be charged because the DA read about a hypothetical crime in the bews?

You can absolutely be arrested and charged for that in the US. The police just generally don't because failure in court is nigh-guaranteed with an uncooperative key witness.

Yeah, sure, you can be arrested for anything or nothing at all. Sorry I wasn’t clear.

Do you have any examples of charges and convictions on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good or service from an owner? Or are we just being pedantic?

Well, sure, here's a quick example of an uncooperative victim and the state attempting (and in this case failing) to prosecute on robbery charges anyway: https://www.norwichbulletin.com/story/news/crime/2009/03/21/...

“charges and convictions” was not an inclusive-or statement

You claimed “In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something.”

Then you shifted the goalposts to “charges and convictions”.

Yes I did. Which I clarified because a pedantic ball flew over the first goal post.

You asked "Do you have any examples of charges and convictions on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good or service from an owner?"

The real question is do you have an example of a judge ruling that someone can't be charged and convicted on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good and service from an owner? Because I'm pretty sure you are wrong.

If you were correct about your belief, I'm sure you can find an example of someone charged with murder and theft, and the theft charges being thrown out because the victim is unavailable to say something was stolen.

I guess in your imagination I can steal money from the wallet of a person in a coma in front of a cop, and get off scot free, since the victim can't testify against me?

No, because you stole in front of a cop. If you stole from a comatose person in the witness of non-cop, and that non-cop has authority of agency over the comatose, they can can press charges and you can be arrested.

Does that help?

You seem to be inventing legal terms and ideas like an improvisational poet ("authority of agency over the comatose"????).

How could that possibly help?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency

As that wikipedia article explains Agency is a commercial law concept. It has nothing to do with the prosecution of crimes under criminal law. Also "authority of agency" isn't a legal term. Which is why you'll find no results on google scholar. Agents have a scope of authority-- but nobody calls this "authority of agency" and furthermore your concept of an "authority of agency" for reporting a crime isn't a thing. (You'd have to actually read the results that come up on google scholar to confirm this as putting in direct quotes in google turns up results that don't contain that exact actual quote.)

Furthermore you know you are just making things up, why not just concede you like to imagine how criminal law works and you are having fun making up things like "authority of agency"?

Or perhaps you think i'm a very stupid person and treating you unfairly, maybe you can educate me by finding a reference for your claim that "In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something"

I suspect your source was your impression of law and order episodes, but even if I'm wrong it seems unfair for you to demand evidence from others without providing any yourself. I look forward to being educated by how you know "In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something".

This seems to be a crazy claim on it's face, since, as I explained, the owner of the object might be dead, in a coma, an infant, being threatened by the mob not to testify, etc. And the concept of hostile witnesses also exists in criminal law.

Ok you’re being rude.

First, my wife is a lawyer.

Second, I pasted that link because I thought you didn’t know what “agency” meant based on your non-sequitur response. As in “principal” and “agent”.

I never claimed that was a legal term. If you are an agent with authority, what would you call it? Power of attorney doesn’t apply here. In general, someone that acts on the behalf of another. That’s it. No one is inventing new words. That’s just how grown-ups talk.

Ergo. If the owner is dead, then someone else is the owner. If the person in a coma, someone else can legally act on their behalf, like a spouse or family member. You know, someone with authority. Acting on behalf, like an agent. There’s those poetic words again! Same applies to an infant. Understood?

Finally, the point I was making is that someone has to report the crime and demonstrate that theft actually occurred for a successful prosecution. You are extremely unlikely to get arrested, much less prosecuted, for openly hypothesizing about whether a theoretical crime took place. Which is the very topic we were originally discussing.

I was fast and loose with the word “owner” because I thought my audience would understand the broader definition. Apparently “agent” doesn’t t work for you either, but whatever you want to call it, I hope for your sake that it’s been made more clear.

I’ve already clarified my position once, and now ad nauseum. I don’t know what else to say if you’re still confused.

Maybe you should ask your wife, because as I understand it the prosecution has to prove a crime occurred beyond a reasonable doubt, that's the legal standard, it's the same standard as in Britain as I understand it. You seem to think that someone with some sort of legal authority on behalf of the victim has to testify that the item was in fact the victim's and was stolen-- this is not correct, it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt with any admissible evidence. Or maybe you agree with me and we are talking past each other, I don't know?

To go back to the Doctor Who example, there's clearly concern by the archivists that admissible evidence exists to show the film was stolen by them. Whether this is likely to be prosecuted and conviction is likely to occur is a different matter.

No, you’re making assertions I didn’t claim. You have to demonstrate that a theft occurred. A theft, by definition, requires a claim of ownership. An owner. Without a claim of ownership, there is no crime because you can trivially argue it was a gift or abandoned property.

Again you are making things up. A defense attorney is welcome to argue (for example) that the guy who battered me unconscious with a baseball bat on the security footage and took my wallet was actually "gifted" my wallet, or the wallet was actually "abandoned" by my unconscious self, but nobody has to testify as to the ownership of my wallet for a successful prosecution. The jury as finder of fact has sufficient evidence from the security footage alone.

Of course I have no idea what you think you mean by "claim of ownership" at this point- courts make ruling based on "admissible evidence" as I said. There is no legal requirement for the evidence to be a "claim of ownership".

Feel free to have last word if you want, this conversation has gotten silly.

Yeah your whole counter argument is basically “nuh-uh”. Let’s go with the wallet analogy, subtraction out the unrelated battery part. Let’s say someone straight up pick pocketed your wallet, you didn’t know, and someone else reported it. The perp gets arrested. One of the three things will happen next:

1. You are informed of the theft. You confirm that the wallet is yours and perp is charged.

2. You are informed of the theft. Instead you claim that it was not stolen because you either don’t care, feel bad for the perp, you hated that wallet anyway, or any other reason. There is no case. One rando stranger’s word against another, the perp walks.

3. You are not informed of the theft. No one can prove that the wallet was stolen, because we find ourselves back in situation #2.

In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something.

Not sure it was that simple in, for example, the case where Aaron Swartz 'stole' articles from JSTOR. JSTOR declined to press charges, but the prosecutor went berserk with self-righteous bloodlust, and well, we all know how that turned out.

He was not charged with theft.

A public promise holds plenty of weight - assuming it's legal in the UK for some police busybody to prosecute on the BBC's behalf without the BBC's consent, it is nevertheless hard to prosecute a crime when your 'victim' is strenuously criticizing you publicly for it and refusing to cooperate. And if you were right that it was so easy and meant so little, then all the more reason to make that public promise, no?

Going forward, it would seem like a good idea for the UK government to stop treating the removal of items from garbage bins as a crime. I'm no lawyer, but a quick web search suggests that nowhere in the US is "dumpster diving" considered illegal.

Oh believe me, it's more than considered illegal. It is literally illegal.

> OP is about reports that BBC refuses to make any legal promises and talk only vaguely about cooperating with owners, when it would be so easy for them to simply publicly promise to not prosecute material stole before, say, 1990.

I'm not sure I buy the article's premise that this is the main issue to be honest. My understanding is that the main problem is simply that some of the people involved just want a bunch of money, and the BBC finds it very hard to countenance why they should pay someone for stuff stolen from them, especially at not very realistic valuations.

Because some individual will have to sign their name on the amnesty.

And no individual in a bureaucracy (British term: jobsworth) is going to stick their neck out without a really solid incentive.

From Sept 2021 to Aug 2022, "old shows" were watched as much as Apple TV+, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/fil...

> the Fishers scooped up rights to low-cost, syndicated staples like Forensic Files and Unsolved Mysteries and library titles with strong cult followings, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to The Greatest American Hero and 21 Jump Street.. FilmRise is now the largest independent provider of content to ad-supported streaming platforms.. in the U.S. top 10, with 21.68 billion cumulative minutes streamed .. just behind Apple TV+, with a cumulative 21.7 billion minutes streamed.

So do these collectors have the ability to play back these recordings? If so, could they at least make some recording (even if pointing a camera while playing back would be better than nothing) to send to the BBC. Otherwise if they have no means to play it back, I fail to understand why they'd not want the opportunity to watch their collection!

It says a lot about the state of the BBC that they produce so little sci-fi that this is actually considered news. Look at Netflix, for whom sci-fi/fantasy is the most popular genre of show and as a consequence they invest heavily into it.

The BBC seems to be staffed by an incredibly narrow and stifling cultural homogeneity in which period dramas that appeal to middle aged women are good, but sci-fi shows that appeal to young men aren't even on the radar. Dr Who is notable primarily because it's one of the only recognizable sci-fi shows they ever made, and it's targeted at kids. The others are mostly comedies like Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker's Guide and they're all from decades ago.

One day the BBC is going to lose the license fee and discover it doesn't even know what types of shows are popular, let alone how to make them.

This isn't news because the BBC produces so little sci-fi, it's news because of the popularity and hstorical legacy of Doctor Who specifically. No one (except maybe lost media nerds) would care if this were about Blake's Seven or something.

It's got nothing to do with it being sci-fi, (except that maybe it makes it more likely to end up here) it's because it's popular & has lost episodes. Dad's Army would make the news for it (but maybe not Hacker News, sure) too.

Just another example of copyright law being garbage.

I'd be more interesting in digging up the corpses of incompetent BBC management from back in the day and prosecuting them than any threat to somebody who has archival content--they ought to be well financially rewarded for protecting that content.

Can’t they just announce an amnesty but make it contingent on turning in any illicitly obtained footage to the BBC?

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