25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite
latenighter.com
latenighter.com
It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially given that they provide access to top shows that people really want to watch. It's like having Breaking Bad-esque product but really screwing up when it comes to wanting people to watch it.
Given the extent to which the tech behind streaming platforms -- storage, CDNs, tie-ups with telecoms -- have been standardized (and democratized, to some extent) by big players like YouTube and Netflix, you would think that a basic ad supported layer of any of these studio specific platforms would make many multiples of what they actually need to put in to setup a basic platform.
The tech's cheap and they already have the content. Most of the older content would be relatively low traffic -- hell, most of these old topical Comedy Central late night shows barely broke a million views when they were new and I don't think jokes about Saddam Hussein and GW's folksy demeanor would click now. How much would it really cost for any big studio to let people view these archives? Am I missing something big that causes somebody like Paramount to go $14B in debt trying to get people to use their streaming service? Is it a function of the business they're in or is it just a case of LA movie studio types not understanding tech?
While traditional publishers may be losing % of daily media consumption - especially in younger age brackets - it's unclear to me where this trend asymptotes. My intuition is that most people will spend some time on "reels" or livestreams (or whatever), some time on blockbuster movies, some on Broadway plays, and some time on scripted produced "TV style" content. Some will expand their denominator of total time to accommodate additional media sources, others will pick one over the other.
It seems there will be a degree of loss of market share as you allude to, but it's unclear how dramatic it will be and where it stabilizes.
One thing is absolutely 100% for sure though in my opinion: media preservation should be deeply prioritized, and this news seems like a blow to that.
Guess who owns MTV and Comedy Central.
Paramount's supposedly got 71,000,000 subscribers. At ~$10/month, they're making something like $8,500,000,000 / yr in subscriber fees. You gotta be daft to lose money on that.
At like a $1,000,000 / episode (last numbers I heard, might be old) that's 8,500 episodes of television a year. Pretty sure they didn't make anywhere near that much content last year. Seems like mostly all they're doing is taking away content and then charging you for it again. Disney already plays this game pretty extensively.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PARA/paramount-glo...
-2.8% annual return since Jan 2006, 4.25% annual return since Jun 2009, and their 5 and 10 year annual returns are way worse (dqdyj total return calculator doesn’t even provide a percentage return).
Meanwhile, SP500 is returning 10%+ per year.
Hell, even ~15+ years ago I knew not to fall for cargo-culting arguments of "come work for us; when we're as valuable as Facebook the stock we'll pay you with will make you a billionaire". Yeah, ... sorry, not moving to Silicon Valley and try to haggle for coffee with imaginary invaluable stocks.
So, I can't believe that ... for all their money's worth, these companies can only come up with "when we have as much users as Netflix, we'll be billionaires".
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.
Notably absent at the time though were many of the big cable networks and movie studios.
Disney was one of the original partners of Hulu through their ownership of ABC.
Also, such channel would likely attract attention of the regulators as a clear example of a cartel.
And even then, Netflix was burning billions of dollars of cash every year to keep operating.
The cable companies got to do it for so long because of the natural monopolies of shared physical infrastructure. To be fair, Netflix has been a major internet infrastructure company and there are arguments to be made about their colocation and peering agreements and the natural monopolies there that gave them an early streaming edge, even if the internet in its early days decided those sort of infrastructure agreements shouldn't create or promote monopolies. But beyond that first mover advantage and with the internet's spirit that peering and colocation are regulated fairly and not monopolistically, who would have gave Netflix the right to become the internet's TV monopoly? Would you have voted for a President who made it a campaign promise to make sure that FCC Regulators declared Netflix a legal monopoly in charge of TV streaming?
Netflix only really ever had the first mover advantage, and it is probably a good thing in the eventual long term that Netflix didn't win everything. It goes that Netflix's early model while it felt "perfectly viable" from a consumer standpoint at the time was obviously not perfectly viable in the long term as a stable situation. The situation we are in now of too many streaming services and cutthroat competition between them maybe isn't sustainable in the long term and certainly doesn't feel "viable" to us as consumers. But it certainly seems more viable and preferable than the timeline where you need to send letters to your local Congress representatives in the hopes that they might legislate Netflix price increases and put FCC pressure on Netflix to serve the content they promised to serve.
This might not be evident, but ViacomCBS/Paramount back catalog is by and large available on Pluto.TV.
In their app it's available played back from VOD as if linear television in highly targeted "channels" which is convenient if you want to have something "on in the background".
More conveniently, it is also available as an Apple TV "Channel" for PlutoTV that makes too many old shows to ever watch available as VOD.
This also seems to be a catalog behind various house branded linear+VOD TVs, e.g. Samsung, Vizio, Comcast... The tell you're looking at a Pluto white label seems to be the TV grid organization by genre.
Because of the rights, it has all the old Star Trek related series, the old Doctor Who, and countless shows of every variety that had been on CBS, Paramount, Viacom, etc. in the past. If you watched 8 hours a day with no repeats, you'd have over 35 years of TV ahead of you...
I think you ought to give them a bit more credit than that.
I think the problem is that launching a streaming service is basically going into competition with their cable partners. It wasn't worth jeopardising their cable revenue at that time.
It's too bad they weren't able to make their free content into a profit stream.
The sad part here is that they were / are a steward to something beloved by many but through copyright they take it as hostage to the grave.
If they no longer find value in distributing it shouldn't they be obligated to waive their ownership?
Maybe copyright itself needs some reform if it grants control over the archaelogical / historical record of our civilization
“The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.“
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/02/johnsteinbeck....
Farmers were going bankrupt because there was so much food that they couldn't sell. It was the time when people developed the habit of eating meat daily, as people were buying out the food, and fed it to animals. There wasn't at any point a famine.
It's a tall tale.
And the originally-quoted passage is about farmers destroying crops as part of price controls due to overproduction.
Could you provide any kind of evidence that the supply of food was evenly shared? Steinbeck spent a lot of time with impoverished farm workers before writing the Grapes of Wrath, so I'm inclined to believe his description of them.
I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction, when all real accounts show food prices almost halving in a decade, in fact I would be willing to speculate that the dust storms that came were in fact caused by the abandonment and large areas being left unsown, with no cover to hold the soil together.
Wealthy farmers destroyed crops that weren't worth the money to sell, yes, and poor farmers went under. That's not a surprising idea, given that it continues to happen in our modern farming system all the time during periods of overproduction.
>I'm not obligated to find a proof against fiction
But you might be compelled to give some counterproof to Steinbeck's non-fiction reporting, which was also linked above.
All first hand accounts of the dust bowl talk about sandstorms bringing sand, everything getting burried in sand. No first hand accounts seem to talk about fields getting stripped of soil, that was documented after the fact. This suggests that the source of the dust were fields that had been abandoned.
It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
Sure you can. Food supply is not just a question of production, you also need logistics and will to distribute. There is currently a global food surplus, but areas of the world are still undergoing famine.
>in fact food prices were dropping
Up to 1931. If you look at the data into the actual Dust Bowl years, 1932 to 1936, prices go back up significantly.
>It doesn't even make sense, Oklahoma isn't dry, the American south is very humid.
But the Dust Bowl occurred in an extended drought period when Oklahoma was incredibly dry. And while it's true that topsoil was lost from fields that weren't farmed, those fields were fallow because of the drought - crops couldn't be grown in the dry conditions.
The fields were abandoned because the prices were so low that cultivating them wasn't profitable. This in fact could have caused the drought as well, as much of the rain in such climates is recycled - the water that evaporated rains back down. And, it can't evaporate well without plants to bring it up from the soil, but only the surface dries out. This might have lead to the dried out top layes getting repeatedly blown away, until the fields got successfully overgrown, and the rains returned.
Curiously, this also happens today. Grocery stores dump a lot of perfectly good food and other goods, and some of them figure that it can't be that someone dumpster-dives instead of buying, therefore they instruct employees to make the trash unusable. Example I've seen first-hand was when throwing away a perfectly good box of laundry detergent, they would open it and spill it into a container of perfectly good fruits and veggies, to make both unusable.
I'm not a freegan, but I knew a few at some point, and the stories I heard even in my local area, makes the quote feel 100% believable.
The irony is that the soviet socialist society failed way, way harder and that average soviet family was far more impoverished than the evicted farmers from the book: those gringos had a car!
Things like video games are much harder to archive than text. Keeping them running 70 years after the death of the author is already a herculean task. Doing that, when no copies are being distributed could make that entirely impossible.
The current copyright system is going to rob the public domain of many of the cultural treasures that we are entitled to.
And apparently the videos are no longer available to download, so it's not an option, anyway.
Barring some change of heart by the copyright holder, these episodes are gone forever.
> Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
The exclusive ability to copy is granted as a conceit.
The restriction only came about because publishers got mad.
US copyright law took a very different path though.
Sounds like Author's Rights to me.
I mean, after life + 70 years you already are entitled to other people's work. And a purpose of patents was to get people to release ideas so culture as a whole can grow from them, rather than just keeping them as trade secrets or whatever.
I absolutely think people should be able to receive some money for it, maybe even for life + 70 years, and people can always not release things, but I think once it's released it's not just yours any more, as it lives in the public conscious.
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 do that, we should change that.
You can’t seriously tell me that if we had a law that said: if you don’t make a video game available commercially for 30 years, it enters the public domain, that would have a meaningful impact on the number of video games created.
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.
(Same thing with patents, that were intended to help more inventions be published, and not be lost as trade secrets, while also helping to build businesses around them..)
Creative works aren't made in a vacuum, all creators take from the public domain. They have an obligation to give back to it.
Copyright and patent terms were designed to facilitate that. The endless extensions of the former were a cynical, self-serving attack on a public good.
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 actual inherent right on their part or responsibility on mine.
Copyright protects works at the moment they are created, not when they are reproduced or distributed. Most of the works under copyright protection have never been distributed.
Copyright also protects work that people wish to keep private, or work that people want to share at some times, with some people, but not all people.
(Also depending on how that idea might be implemented, it could cause some strange situations for copyleft software)
And also, the copyleft complication too: If Bob writes a FOSS app with a GPL license, and it becomes popular, but then Bob retires and stops distributing it, does the copyright expire?
I don't think the problem being discussed here is insurmountable to solve, I just think the proposed solution opens a whole new can of worms. I think a good start at a solution is to first shorten the duration of copyright.
The copyright terms are set by lobbyist and corporations in a political process where the public interest has no representation.
Even Brood War is still satisfactorily supported 26 years after its release. Though I think that’s definitely long enough to consider the option of public domain.
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.
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 might feel are “derivatives” of newer innovations from subsequent updates, even if the third-party feels they only based their work on the original release.
There’s often a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree, and it can be difficult to create quality third-party derivatives which avoid any similarities to newer versions of the IP.
Think of creating a modern representation of Mickey Mouse. If you create a new version of Mickey Mouse based on the 1928 version in Steamboat Willy, it is difficult to make something that looks relatively contemporary without creating something that looks arguably derivative of the 1953 work “The Simple Things” or the 1940 work “Fantasia”. You could play it safe by using something that looks like a carbon copy of Steamboat Willy, but if your personal artistic vision involves a more contemporary art style, it is understandably difficult to make it unambiguously not a derivative of more recent depictions that are still under copyright.
For the Starcraft 2 example - in a thought experiment where the 14 year old “Wings of Liberty” version is now public domain but the 11-year old “Heart of the Swarm” expansion pack and current 9-year old “Legacy of the Void” version of StarCraft 2 are both still under copyright. You want to make a new single-player campaign which takes place after LotV and doesn’t retcon any canon events (many of which are still copyrighted). A careful creator would probably understand they couldn’t make any references to Amon being reborn and defeated by Artanis, because that plot is from the still-copyrighted Legacy of the Void. But would you be able to write a storyline that contains any acknowledgements that Zeratul died? (Zeratul died at the hand of his friend, Artanis, due to some of Amon’s mind-control machinations during that same LotV campaign)
I think a creator would have to be careful precisely how their storyline acknowledges Zeratuls death. If its just a few characters generically lamenting the loss of a great/controversial man…probably fine? What if the loss of their friend Zeratul was specified to have occurred “in battle” with no other specifics about the battle? I have no clue. If your storyline includes a tiny quip about Artanis dealing with unspecified guilt/shame over Zeratul’s unspecified death … then that might be technically infringing until LotV falls out of copyright, because some people may feel that it’s specific enough to be definitely derived from the LotV campaign.
Note that all three of these similar examples are where a creator does in fact intend to create a derivation of copyrighted materials to create a sequel campaign to the uncopyrighted work which is still “in-canon” with respect to still-copyrighted works. Its just exploring where is the line of “how much derivation can you morally and/or ethically and/or legally get away with before at least one reasonable person genuinely feels you have elements that are unambiguously derived from still-copyrighted content?”
For “legally” getting away with something you have to consider the costs of successfully defending yourself against lawsuits from notoriously overly-litigious corporations like Disney/Nintendo/Blizzard. Are you so safe that you could get a summary dismissal or is there any reason it could qualify for awards of punitive damages under Anti-SLAPP laws?
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.
The recent resurge of interest and player activity based on a wildly unbalanced and broken but fun 'Broodwar Units in SC2' mod is testament to this [1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1cqw7hv/sc1_vs_s...
The issue here isn't so much, "Are Blizzard allowed to charge for SC2?", but "What would happen if Blizzard pulled the plug on SC2 servers?" It would very much be a shame if a game like that were suddenly ripped out of the culture.
The copyright lobby frames that question in a profoundly toxic way: are there any marginal profits that can still be milked for our IP portfolio? Of course there are, you can milk pennies even from "Steamboat Willie" and Chaplin movies, but that doesn't mean we should have perpetual copyright.
What matters is the first few years where 90% of the profits are made, that's what motivates the creator; motivating the creator enough to create and "promoting the useful arts" are the purpose of copyright, there is no "natural" right to one's ideas and creation. It's a social and political compromise for the good of all.
Indeed, Blizzard developer Jason Hall previously revealed that a single cosmetic skin for your horse in WoW made more money than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
The only reason that Starcraft2 is alive at all is the late-cycle introduction of a co-op mode, with microtransaction gated cosmetics, 'commanders', and commentator voicepacks. The online is all but dead, with almost no moderation and stewardship, and plagued by maphackers at all tiers. Even something as basic as the EU MMR brackets for tier ranking are completely broken for nearly a year.
#1 - It was LAN first, offline, distributed as Shareware. The forgiving netcode and leniency of distribution ended up with it as a standard install on any Internet Cafe on the planet in the early 00s. It also hit Korean culture at exactly the right moment for it to go so popular as to become a cultural touchpoint. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book in there somewhere - it literally became South Korea's unofficial national sport [1]
[1]https://www.wsj.com/video/starcraft-south-korea-unofficial-n...
#2 - It was subject to a high-profile remaster as part of Blizzard's "Classic Games division", who also did rushed and careless remasters of Diablo 3 and Warcraft 3. The post-release monetization here is quite telling, as it was basically all aimed at the Korean market - popular South Korean StarCraft casters and Children's TV hosts providing the available announcer packs, with the main cosmetic being a chibi-'cartoonised' version of the standard asset pack.
More of an obstacle is competition from free past versions - a lot of people would be happy with a 10 year old version of Photoshop or MS Office. That's why I think it should be extendable to 20 years with a hefty fee (but not further, or only with a much heftier fee).
Pulling back copyright doesn't necessarily force people to share -- people can also keep secrets. A primary purpose of IP law is to encourage sharing.
And my overall point is that a work that has been compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections. And so I don't think it's at all appropriate to use the word "sharing" to describe such works.
> compiled/DRMed/etc will never enter (be shared with) the public domain even after the copyright term expires - rather it will still remain subject to the technical protections.
You could argue da Vinci did the same with his underdrawings. And many other artists have similarly not shared their sources. You're making more of an argument about a right of collaboration, which is not only a completely different argument, it is the opposite of what copyright attempts to do, which is to give rights to the original artist.
If you're making the suggestion that artists should be compelled to share sources, I disagree and think that is extremely shortsighted. Sharing should be done voluntarily by the artist, and if they don't want to share their sources and methods, they shouldn't be required to. In absence of that right, chilling effects on artistic freedom are an obvious outcome. I love FOSS licensing, but those types of arrangements should be voluntarily chosen by authors, not compelled by the force of law.
And no I'm not talking about a right of collaboration. "Collaboration" implies the original author is still alive and even participates with some back and forth. I'm talking about the ability to simply use creative works after they're supposed to have become part of the public domain - not still locked behind the non-expiring technical block of digital restrictions management, not unusable due to API churn, etc.
The GPL defines the source as the preferable working format to make changes and updates to the program, but you can see how that definition blows up in your face when there is no published source to begin with. "Your honor, that 50MB binary file that has a signature of a GCC compiled program IS the preferred working format for our company; indeed, it was created from temporary text files, but they were deleted as they were deemed unnecessary for a technically advanced company such ourselves. All further updates will be made in assembly language via binary patching, for maximum efficiency".
Also if the best of your "great number of reasons" is fallacious legal reasoning of the type software engineers tend to be drawn to, then I don't think that's much of an argument.
Also handcrafted assembly isn't sufficient for your argument, but rather one would have to directly write a binary with a hex editor. Show me any binary larger than say 1 MB that was written with a hex editor. So really the burden of proof would be on anyone claiming that a large binary is direct creation.
That's not how any of this works. Once I've submitted my binary to the escrow, then it's an original work worthy of copyright until challenged. If someone breaks my copyright, I simply assert my originality and get an injunction against it by default. If the adversary claims my work is a derivative, then the legal burden is on them to prove it - because they are the ones rising it as defense against infringement. So I've already quashed 90% of adversaries by this point just by legal intimidation.
Also, you are attacking a strawman version of this problem. In practice, what will be submitted to the repository are binary object files for the core proprietary sections that are unlikely to be changed, for example the file format definitions to preclude interoperability. Anything else can be source, the final linker step is automated etc. The market will also offer tools for binary randomization and compiler signature obfuscation.
So you are left with a technological arms race that needs to be settled in court, on a case by case basis, using expert testimony where the burden of proof belongs to the infringer. It's just absurd to think anything like this could ever work in practice to promote source availability, or there would be public benefits to put such a highly litigious system in place.
Are you referring to some existing system? Because otherwise we're discussing in the abstract how this could work. And it would be straightforward for the copyright office to have a rule prima facie rejecting machine-executable binaries being claimed as original works, unless compelling proof were submitted that it had been directly created. Because as I said, show me any substantial executable that has been directly created with a hex editor.
The idea of a company choosing a few critical parts that they then (honestly or dishonestly) claim as original binary works is interesting. But note that this still would go a long way towards making the overall work part of the public domain when it expired - such blobs are highly unlikely to contain references to libraries with API churn and whatnot. And even if they somehow do, since they are small enough to be directly worked on, they can be directly fixed.
Copyright is a tax on society. It's not an inalienable right. We keep it for the noble purpose of encouraging authors to create. We don't want them to rest on their laurels. So why are we locking up all of our content for life plus 70? It sounds like a prison sentence.
I realize that removing the paperwork saved the Government paying for a bunch of jobs and removed a source of accidental "got ya" style mistakes of subtly misfiled paperwork. But the paperwork was also meant to help archival purposes. There was even a time that everything filed needed to send a full copy to the Library of Congress, guaranteeing at least one archival copy. (But then publishing far outpaced the Library's physical space and ability to actually archive everything.)
We have the technology to automate the jobs out of the paperwork and maybe at least the possibility to build an endowment for digital archives that don't need to worry as much about physical space, so maybe it's also time to think about bringing the paperwork back.
Then you own that physical painting.
> Do I lose the copyright then
Yes
> and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away?
No, but if you gave your friend Bob a copy of the painting, he's allowed to copy that copy as much as he wants once you lose the copyright.
The original copyright system-- you could only get the full term by extending 14 years in. That's maybe a little early. But making you pay a fee to keep the exclusivity and/or show recent use in trade makes sense.
Wouldn't this require Bob to outlive the artist by many, many years? My understanding was that copyright extends well past the death of the original creator.
EDIT: I'm curious why this is downvoted. Am I incorrect about the length of copyright being decades past the death of the creator? A quick google shows that it extends to 70 years past the life of the creator, [1] which means that it would be quite unlikely that an adult who receives artwork from the creator would live to see the time when it's not under copyright. That is, even if the artist died the next day, it would be 70 years before the copyright expires.
1: https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
A. Someone proposed making copyright "use it or lose it"
B. Someone else said this could have unintended consequences, like people breaking into your house to take a copy of a work where copyright has lapsed.
C. I pointed out that's not how copyright works: it has nothing to do with control of physical artifacts.
D. You then presumed that the copyright runs for a long time, which contradicts the premise we're talking about in "A", and is completely out of left field. (In any case, it's irrelevant to the question in B-C; if I have the one of the only extant copies of something from a century ago, you still can't come take it to make a copy).
If you paint something, show to a few people, then decide to put it in the drawer, nobody cares. However, if you displayed that painting in galleries for the past 20 years, became semi-famous for it, and then decide to destroy your work, I'd say the public has a stake and a right to say "no", to at least make and preserve some copies. On top it being an asshole move to destroy well-known work, even if you have the right to do it.
> And copyright is not forever.
It effectively is if you destroy the work before your copyright on it expires.
Let me give you some examples of why these laws are actually good:
* Adverse possession: Imagine someone has been living and maintaining a property for 30 years. They have a single family home, and a driveway. They have a fence around all of their property, and they pay taxes on all of the area. The footprint of the property is exactly as they bought it 30 years ago. Their property is beside a piece of undeveloped, unoccupied, unmaintained land. Today, a land developer purchases the undeveloped land, and they come up with a 100 yr old document that shows that the part of the lot where their driveway is should be part of their lot. The developer then demands that the fence be torn down, and the driveway be given to them, despite the fact that the homeowner bought the property that way, has paid taxes on and maintained that property for 30 years, and nobody has brought this up as an issue in the past 100 years.
* "Squatters" (really, tenants) rights: Imagine someone rented a home in 2020. They've been paying rent every month since then, on a month-to-month basis, without a written lease. In 2024, the home was sold to an investor who wants to renovate the home and flip it. The investor wants to flip the home as quickly as possible, so they tell the tenant to leave immediately with no notice. They call the police and tell them that someone is squatting in their home. The police tell the owner that they must file for eviction, because they are not capable of determining whether the person living in the home is a "squatter" or a tenant. Only a court can do this.
Adverse possession is really just a recognition that mistakes made a long time ago shouldn't undo current realities. And "squatters rights" are really just a recognition that tenants don't have to defend their own property rights in front of a cop on their front porch at 2am on a Tuesday, they get to defend their rights to their leased property in court.
I could see how this might make sense for things that can be perfectly copied, but not so much for anything that is even slightly 3D.
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
I don't know about that. Regarding "free", it was always under copyright and distributed restrictively (DRM, ads, and geo-blocking). And no comment necessary for "benevolent".
Back when Walt Disney started, copyright was 28 years. That was good enough for him to get started producing a media empire. The Berne Convention requires 50 years-why not just go back to that standard instead of the 95 years today?
95 years for works for hire; 70 years + life of the author if they make it themselves.
There are very few pieces of work that their authors are still getting benefit from, but could be lost to history. Documentaries have to be censored to remove elements now that require licensing of materials.
Walt Disney got his start remaking old works (public domain) into new ones. How many Walt Disney's are we preventing from letting them make better use of Mickey Mouse? We will find that out soon when the trademark Disney has been trying to impose gets challenged.
This has the nice benefit of encouraging companies to make good use of their works as much as possible in the limited time instead of holding out to get a better deal.
The amount of information that is being lost is outrageous.
There is a huge startup opportunity here for folks who are willing to chase these content and do the last mile on their behalf.
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 sense.
There is of course a new question of how to set the price, but you could e.g. have an auction of some kind where the highest bid must be accepted.
(There are certainly notable cases like Mein Kampf where copyright has been conspicuously used to prevent further distribution.)
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?
I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options.
The normalization can be the same as licensing is done now, "per work", negotiating specific usages needn't change, except that the seller has to allow that each covered work be subject to at least one must-sell auction per e.g. year. They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.
Does the auction have any teeth at all in that case? Just always bit an infinite amount of money, if you don't want to sell.
Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.
Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)
Try seeing how many Beatles songs you can include in another work that you distribute internationally and let me know how that goes.
You can perhaps do something similar for video, but it's hard to do that for all copyrighted material. Eg for a video game a single sprite has a very different value than some modules in the game's engine.
Is that a proportion of revenue, or an absolute amount? For the former, what if I give away the music for free?
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.
Have you not seen the U.S.? It doesn't matter. The system is orchestrated to existing money-people making money simply for having it in the first place.
Even "bankruptcy" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Your interest or legitimate use cases do. not matter. At all. Ever. For entertainment or technology.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/10/22/the-co...
I was refuting this:
> The system is orchestrated to existing money-people making money simply for having it in the first place.
> Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
> lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators.
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.
At any rate, it's not the same (classic, imo) album that was released in 1990.
Imagine this in a historical context, what if the publisher of Poe or Hemingway just decided to burn all their manuscripts and stop publishing because it was a better tax write off than their accountants though they would make on the lifetime sales of the work.
Because this is exactly what we are doing to future generations, lighting art on fire.
The people making these decisions didn't spend any time, blood, or sweat on producing this content. That's why it's so easy for them to discard it: they're only concerned with making (big) money, not figuring out how they can preserve content without incurring a loss. Which, IMO, should be the goal for older, historical content.
I'm pretty sure the money we're paying countries for wars would cover historical content preservation costs a gazillion times over.
In all seriousness, giving existing and potential customers more reasons to spend their time on YouTube is not good for their business.
The idea that youtube should even be a threat to their content highlights one of the problems with this arrangement.
That’s a meaningless distinction for consumers. YouTube has some content of good production value among a sea of crap. Giving it more professionally produced content only weakens the old guard.
A channel i follow getting <500k views a week calls ad revenue a rounding error in the grand scheme of things now.
Would recommend the video where he digs into the experiment, https://youtu.be/uvu3SDigoMA
Online storage is relatively expensive but software developers sell the idea of "cloud" storage instead of offline storage. Eventually people want to cut costs. Overpriced "cloud storage" is a likely target.
Why are these ideas pushed on computer users despite contravening common sense. Answer: Greed.
This is also the only way Ainsley Hayes can possibly manifest outside of Aaron Sorkin's imagination.
I'm sure it's not "zero" but I think I'm missing something...is it copyright savings or something?
Their company IS paramount plus now. It’s all going there.
Most of the comments here seem to have missed that, if true. I did not read the article, the headline implies otherwise, but that surely can be clickbait.
>Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
They are betting the company on people paying for paramount plus, it would make no sense for them to have free content anywhere else. They’re moving it all now.
Don't be obnoxious. Paramount Plus already culled content in 2023 per the link I gave, they have given no expectation they will make all their back catalog available. Likely they will make more of it available, but not all like you are predicting.
But what’s important is they’re all in on Paramount Plus. They won’t have content outside of that, and why should they?
Obnoxious is ignoring verb tenses and responding to something someone didn’t say multiple times.
It's a real shame too because I might actually be tempted to at least burn a free trial of that service if they had The Colbert Report
>Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
>You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.
In only states you can watch many seasons and no mention it would be all in the future.
At the end of the day they’ll all merge into a few streaming services but they cannot afford to sit it out.
- for example, they only have two seasons of The Daily Show (S28, S29) https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/the-daily-show/ . Reportedly they don't have the Colbert Show at all(!)
- here's a list of 21 Paramount Plus shows that were disappeared 6/2023: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/21-paramount-plus-shows-just-...
- Quora: Why doesn’t Paramount Plus have all the seasons to all of their shows? https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn-t-Paramount-Plus-have-all-th...
[0]: "25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gone as Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site" https://latenighter.com/news/paramount-axes-comedy-central-w...
Edit: this was downvoted, and I don't understand why. Am I wrong in thinking this action was made in pursuit of a write down? FWIW, this wasn't a thoughtless comment by a random Internet passerby; I hold 41,905 shares of PARA.
My team requested access to a tool in the company, and the finance department said it was too expensive to get an additional license. We fought for 6 months to get that license.
The moment we got access, we saw that everyone was on the high end plan, and not even using it as it was intended. We even saw an account called Sample-test that was costing upwards of $15k a month.
Now we pay $1000 a year.
Paramount+ rushed to get in the game. They even borrowed the plus in their name. Now they need those frugal devs to make it work and help save money.
MTV news website goes dark, archives pulled offline
> The move would appear to be part of continued belt-tightening measures at Paramount, which is more than $14 billion in debt, led by losses at Paramount+ and its aging cable networks.
No, never, not us...
During a time when they could have been making deeper investments in these business and capturing large parts of a growing media market they completely ceded the space and any expertise they had in it all to pad their own paper value. Immediately after the merger they lost a lot of licensing revenue because they drastically overestimated the value of the corporate assets they cherry picked for themselves.
CEO's had the company take the debt on, paid themselves fat bonuses and hoped that the little people downstairs would invent something new that would save the company.
That is about as market price as it gets. Also, if you dig into the proxy forms, I bet you would find those CEOs probably got paid in Paramount stock with various lockup terms before they could sell, so they probably didn’t make out as well as you think.
My morals are confused
Intuitively if this media is truly otherwise gone forever, it appears more like salvage than theft.
There should be an open royalty payments system for everything and available to citizens. So that I can credibly say, "look, I did pirate this entire TV series, but I want to pay the obligatory contract rate, and I want that money to go to the creators."
You buy a movie and the creators get their proportion automatically. You now have the official version of the movie. You take the movie and make a fan cut and sell that, you are added to the chain as a creator, you specify your cut and all the creators continue to get royalties.
It doesn't stop piracy but it makes the royalty system transparent and it gives the creation an independent life. It distributes copyright or ownership I guess. Derivatives can also be worked on and sold easily. You could have any third party "popcorn" app that had this micro payment within it.
(In reality studios put up huge sums of money to finance a movie, this use case couldn't address that side, just the selling and distribution of digital things)
Suppose an alternative implementation where a media file contains a signed certificate of creatorship that can include other certificates (so your can cut would have a certificate signed by you, including as a payload the original certificate signed by the original creator). I can immediately see several attacks on this system, but I don't see an attack that blockchain would solve.
For example, the fan cut could just not include the original creator's certificate. I don't see how a blockchain would help in uncovering this. Maybe if the blockchain contains the full video files? Then you could use regular plagiarism detection software or ContentID-type systems to find possible rights violations. But then the blockchain size would quickly balloon beyond the point of usefulness, and also it's not substantially different from just putting all the involved media on public web servers for people to mirror.
/s
"While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows."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
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.
They certainly do. File formats become obsolete, the drives can accumulate errors, when copying the files from an old drive to a new one, some files may get forgotten about, someone loses some metadata, etc.
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).
Someone will buy their IP and back catalogue in a bankruptcy. Those will retain value and even highly speculative properties might be worth owning just in case if the price is right.
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.
> This case stems from a copyright infringement case filed by Fox News back in 2013 against TVEyes [...]
> On December 3rd [2018], the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for writ of certiorari in TVEyes, Inc. v. Fox News Network, LLC, declining the opportunity to decide what would have been the Court’s first case on fair use in a copyright context in 20 years. [1]
[1] https://ipwatchdog.com/2018/12/31/scotus-declines-2d-cir-mar...
So you deal with this by having a backup. Now you have 2x the cost.
But, unfortunately, you could have two hard drives not spin up. You consider an additional backup, but at this point you're at 3x the cost, so you start to reconsider letting hard drives sit on shelves.
Now you're in RAID country. RAID is not a backup, but by shifting your focus to availability you now have an approach to dealing with the "will it spin-up?" issue by proactively dealing with the problem via monitoring and rebuilds when necessary. You keep several replacement HDDs on hand for this inevitability.
Now, since you know RAID is not a backup, you put a backup system in place. This is additional cost; even more if you go 3-2-1.
So now you've got hard drives, storage arrays, HBAs, backups, and the power all of this consumes. We're starting to get out of cheap territory.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is: If you have a lot of data, hard drives are only cheap if you don't care availability, integrity, and longevity.
It's been studied in various ways for a while now.
or your free time - but what is not worth even ones free time can't be worth much to one at all so...
$2000. (shucked drives, but this includes the server and ECC)
If the data is invaluable, throw down a couple of these at homes of friends and family.
I still don't consider it "cheap" even though I make a good chunk of change like many on this website, but I think this is because I think in terms of what my friends & family could afford.
I don't know, I guess you'd have to search regularly to find out.
I do see 9-11-year-old episodes of The Daily Show and Colbert Report currently on CC's YT page, yet not available on Paramount Plus. Maybe Paramount Plus will use YT to gauge which of their back-catalog there is interest for.
*website
And sure enough, it's gone.
My first try, the classic interview between Jon and Joe Biden in 2015, where Biden admits he unwittingly politically used a story about a family coal miner that didn't exist. Interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice. Their 2000 and 2004 coverage of the RNC and DNC conventions, all gone.
https://www.cc.com/video/j6f55l/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew... https://www.cc.com/video/kqe9tb/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew...
Yeah, I think I have a feeling about that, but I think really this is just a loss of some of our common story.
oh wait that is cartoonetwork, nevermind, well actually you never know