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They could have easily auctioned off/sold very old content to someone else..

That assumes they own the exclusive rights to the content. A lot of media has many rights holders (writers, music, etc), and you need to get them all to agree a sale or waive their right in order to sell. That could be expensive because it's involve lots and lots of lawyers. For a bunch of old comedy clips it might not make any commercial sense.

But is this content available somewhere else then? Should it not have been archived then or given to those who hold those rights so they could publish?

If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, but didn't have veto over publication, how bad would that be? The reasons people usually justify copyright protection usually centre on rewarding the creators, and I think the right to stop people seeing your work is a harder sell.

There is of course a new question of how to set the price, but you could e.g. have an auction of 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.)

> If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, [...]

How much would they get paid? What if they wanted to hold out for more? Would every piece of copyrighted material be paid the same? Or would you normalise it per sentence or per letter? Or per frame in a movie?

I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain.

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.

> 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.

Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.

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.

You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.

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.)

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

It really hasn't.

Try seeing how many Beatles songs you can include in another work that you distribute internationally and let me know how that goes.

Also to a first approximation we can treat all music as roughly interchangeable and we can measure the 'amount' of music eg by runtime or by song, so compulsory licensing can set some arbitrary fees.

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.

There is some system like this for music in Austria. I may record a new version of your song but it entitles you to a writers credit and some guaranteed amount of all revenue.

> [...] some guaranteed amount of all revenue.

Is that a proportion of revenue, or an absolute amount? For the former, what if I give away the music for free?

This sounds like regulatory failure creating a deadweight loss. IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong.

It absolutely is a regulatory failure. The point of copyright was to protect authors not eliminate the public domain.

> IP rights were invented to further the creation and distribution of works in the arts and sciences; if they're making it prohibitively difficult we're doing it wrong

They definitely further the creation, as we can't see the old stuff! I find music to be particularly bad here. People on Youtube can clip videos with fair use and talk over them, but any audio with music in needs to be muted, even if it's part of the fair use, because music is enforced so stringently.

Comedy is especially problematic. You have a standup show with lots of comedians and a band. Just imagine the IP interests.

> They sure spent days and months of blood and sweat but can't get around to do a last mile of uploading files.

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.

  > lot of my favorite music albums are still on cassette tapes and never digitized online by their creators.

Or worse. Rust In Peace was completely rerecorded by studio musicians and that's what you get if you look for it on Spotify or even buy a new CD today! To actually hear the album as recorded originally, you need to find a thirty-year old disc and just deal with the scratches.

> Rust In Peace was completely rerecorded by studio musicians

Are you talking about the 1990 Megadeth album?

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

GP is not quite correct. It wasn't completely re-recorded, but Dave Mustaine re-recorded many of the guitar solos on the album, and the whole album was remixed.

At any rate, it's not the same (classic, imo) album that was released in 1990.

Many of the vocals were rerecorded as well.

Same story with the original Star Wars films. Lucas remastered and changed the originals, and you can mostly only get the original versions on VHS.

Playing devil's advocate, it's the artists' content. Don't they have the right to go back and make it more in line with their original vision?

Let them make a new version if they want, sure, but removing access to the original is what rankles.

Exactly, I'm not going to argue that artists don't have the right to re-release their material. It's the destruction of the original that to me is unconscionable.

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.

> This is complete incompetence from their leadership who show no value to their own content

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.

The US has the most millionaires, and creates them the fastest[0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/10/22/the-co...

Should that be the goal of the economy?

I wasn't say it's the goal of the economy.

I was refuting this:

> The system is orchestrated to existing money-people making money simply for having it in the first place.

It's not even a refutation though.

Care to explain?

They can still sell it. We shouldn't assume because the webservers were shut down that everything is deleted and gone. When the article says it's "gone" they mean it is no longer available to the public.

Torrents.

They're not deleting that content. They just moving it to paramount+ subscription service.

third paragraph of the article

> Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.

Unfortunately most of their properties aren't on Paramount+