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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of known lost episodes out there that collectors saved from thrash. The BBC knows it, everyone knows it, but the collectors won't come forward because they are afraid they are going to be prosecuted. They basically stole property which was meant to be destroyed.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/11/lost-do...

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The cost to make a digital copy from film stock has gone way down, to the point that fan groups [1][2] frequently encode and clean up old copies of film:

[1]: https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/c/kinekovideo

This of course has various IP implications...

This seems like a weird hangup. Is it likely?

Taking these films back in the 60s might’ve been illegal, but has anyone actually been prosecuted for it in modern times? Haven’t other lost episodes been recovered from ‘illegitimate’ sources without issue?

If it’s a real risk, it also seems weird to me that it’s apparently known that some people have these. Like, if there was really appetite for prosecuting them wouldn’t that be enough to start an investigation?

The BBC can be very pigheaded, i.e. offering no incentives for people coming forward.

Even without losses, they have a trackrecord of stockpiling a lot of old content but not making it available to the public. I doubt this would happen to Doctor Who but it would elsewhere. You would think with streaming that the BBC could make a lot of obscure old content available, but they don't.

That's not just the BBC, it's any broadcaster, because it costs nonzero dollars, time, and effort to move something online that they have no idea whether anyone cares about. Our national TV archives are like that as well, tons of stuff in vaults but if you want to see it you need to contact them and ask for it. I did that for some zany 80s comedy that they had listed but wasn't online, a few weeks later it was online, they just needed an indication that there was some interest in it.

It is a big world out there. Surely there are archivists who would make a digital copy outside of BBC jurisdiction, and then said digital copy could be similarly provided via sneaker net to a (presumably) friendly Swedish seaman.

It feels very doable, given the downstream effects of Brexit.

I don't really understand, it seems like if this was the main thing preventing people from returning them there would be ways around it. Couldn't they return them anonymously or upload them to the internet or something?

I mean, at that point you're distributing piracy, no?

Arrrr! Aye aye maitey'tis a heavy toll, but the prize be worth the parley

Is it still piracy if there's no other way to obtain it? Who are you pirating from? The past?

I remember when Eccleston's version came out and all the nerd blogs were crying cause this means these episodes were never gonna be released.

You are so right.They are never gonna be released.

The original... takers of these films are dying off. It's well known that many episodes exist within private collections. The prevailing belief in the fandom is that they will be get released as the owners pass away. Indeed, that's likely where these two came from.

It is, in fact, exactly where these two came from.

I would have thought there would be parties willing to anonymously rip and upload any such materials?

I was involved in recovering some extremely famous movie props that had been stolen many years prior by a studio employee. The studio wanted to restore them and display them, and they are now on loan to a museum.

We knew who had them because (almost) all the people that stole these kinds of pieces ended up not being able to keep it to themselves and would mention it one day on a forum etc. The studio's lawyers sent letters which they ignored. In the end someone realized that the guy lived very close to the writer of the movie in LA, so we called them and had them knock the on the guy's door. That worked.

That seems a bit overblown. Can you really imagine the BBC prosecuting someone over this? It'd be PR suicide. And if you read TFA they were thrilled to get the two lost episodes back, no mention of prosecution or anything else.

Some of the people who've been involved in getting previously found episodes returned/restored have stated that they know of collectors who are likely to have copies of other episodes but are worried about how they'd be treated.

My gut reaction is that people don't come forward to maintain their bragging rights.

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