Why We’re Just Now Getting the 1960s Batman TV Show on DVD | Hacker News Reader

Why We’re Just Now Getting the 1960s Batman TV Show on DVD

wired.com

63 pointsghosh55 comments

The rights to many shows are tangled into "byzantine" webs. This is often a good thing, for reasons of economic incentives.

To use a personal example: let's look at the various parties involved in making "The Simpsons," whose DVDs have been available for many years. I had the good fortune to work on this show, albeit in a limited capacity, many moons ago. On this show, you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen (and I may be mangling some names here and there):

- Gracie Films (production company)

- Fox Television Studios (studio)

- Fox Broadcasting Company (network)

- Akom (animation company, based in Korea)

- 20th Century Fox Licensing & Merchandising division

- Whoever holds the rights for the music and theme song

- Matt Groening

- Syndicators in US and around the world

- Actors, writers, crew, and their various agents, managers, and lawyers

- Affiliates and home video partners

- Effects shops (if any, and if different from services performed by Akom)

Why would you want all of these moving parts? Isn't coordinating all of these stakeholders like herding cats? Well, yes. But absent this ecosystem of specialized players, no single player would be able to do everything at scale. The distributed ecosystem of TV development, production, distribution, and licensing is more efficient -- and allows for more shows to be made in the first place! -- than a system where a single company performs every step of the process.

Of course, this distributed system has its downsides. Complexity being a big one. No single party can unilaterally make decisions on behalf of the entire show. When the right aggregation of the aforementioned parties cannot come to an agreement about X, Y, or Z, then X, Y, or Z simply don't get done. This seems to have been the case with the Batman series. It's the case for several beloved shows, whose absence from the home video market is noticeable. It sucks when it happens.

This system is far from perfect. It is riddled with inefficiencies. Occasionally it leads to some mind-numbingly frustrating stalemates. It's especially bad about managing music rights; many high-profile shows have come to DVD and Blu-ray only very recently, after many years of wrangling the rights to the music in the shows. (Particularly '80s shows, which often relied on lots and lots of the pop music of the day). But in many ways, and on the balance, today's system is an improvement over the systems that came before it.

Generally speaking, this system is great at getting shows made. It is less than great at getting shows distributed to streaming services and home video. The system's strengths at the former are its weaknesses at the latter. It's an interesting paradox.

The sad thing is, we already had a fallback method, for when the many, many parties which helped to create iconic shows could not come to a deal after decades: public domain. However, no published work will enter the public domain again until 2019, with Batman '66 only public in 2062, and that is all assuming Disney doesn't push yet another extension through.

I agree with you there. No argument.

The belief that public domain discourages economic incentives to leverage a property has been proven, time and again, demonstrably false. Look at Sherlock Holmes, for example. Or hell, look at Hans Christian Andersen, from whose works Walt Disney has made a fortune (The Little Mermaid, Frozen, etc.).

Yes, but how much money did the Andersen family make off Frozen?

The amount they deserve.

As I posted elsewhere, you seem to be missing the point I was trying to make. But let's run with it:

What does "deserving" have to do with it? If I write the next Great American Novel and assign royalties to my favorite children's charity, do they deserve the royalties? No, I do, but I decided to give that income straight to them and my wishes should be respected in this regard.

Setting aside issues of public domain, Hans Christian Andersen does deserve to be compensated for his work at least for the duration that the copyrights are his. And if he chooses to assign those royalties to his heirs on his death, then those people should be recipients just as if he had assigned royalties to some charity. Deserving has got nothing to do with it.

Hans Christian Andersen published "The Snow Queen" in 1844, which is roughly 169 years prior to Disney's release of Frozen. Frozen is a loose adaptation of "The Snow Queen," and for all intents and purposes, it is mostly new material. Andersen's heirs have had plenty of time to capitalize on the characters and scenarios involved in "The Snow Queen" between 1844 and whenever Disney first started work on Frozen. Andersen receives an "inspired by" credit on the film, though as far as I am aware, his family does not receive any royalties or other financial consideration.

Now, many people would argue that that's perfectly fair. But they'd also argue that it's hypocritical for Disney to profit from adapting public-domain properties, while lobbying the government to preserve its own IP well beyond the IP's putative lifespan of exclusivity. It'll be a hot day in Arendelle before a Disney princess enters the public domain.

Let's look at a fascinating example: the story of Mickey Mouse, who first appeared in 1928. Mickey isn't entering the public domain anytime soon, because Disney's lawyers are brilliant. They've found ways to extend Walt Disney's original copyright -- and furthermore, to move beyond copyrights and into trademarks, which have different lifespans. Mental Floss sums it up better than I can: http://mentalfloss.com/article/30946/why-isnt-mickey-mouse-p...

Context, context. The post I was replying to seemed to imply that Hans Christian Andersen somehow had economic incentive to create his works even though they would enter the public domain because later Disney would create Frozen. That logic makes no sense to me. I was trying to point out that the economic incentives driving creation of original content is totally divorced from the later derivation of those works in the public domain.

"The post I was replying to seemed to imply that Hans Christian Andersen somehow had economic incentive to create his works even though they would enter the public domain because later Disney would create Frozen."

That's not what I said, and not what I meant to imply. But if that's what you inferred from my post, then I'll accept full responsibility for having been unclear. That's my fault. I think you and I are in less disagreement than you might think.

What I meant to say:

1. Andersen created "The Snow Queen" 169 years before Disney released Frozen. In pretty much any copyright regime around the world, Andersen's copyright would have expired long before Disney started work on Frozen. That includes any posthumous copyright periods, during which the IP presumably passed to Andersen's heirs. [1]

2. My point about the public domain, and economic incentives, had more to do with Disney. It is sometimes claimed, by Disney and by others, that the public domain is a bad thing. If works fall into the public domain, or so this argument goes, then they enter a sort of "deadpool." Nobody will touch them again. They'll become commodities. They'll lose their inherent value. Only the original creators (or heirs) of a property have a rational economic incentive, and the necessary creative skill, to profit from the property. I reject this logic. By way of example, I pointed to two properties -- Sherlock Holmes and "The Snow Queen" -- that fell into the public domain, and whose public-domain status has not stopped others from coming along and revitalizing them. The case of "Snow Queen"/Frozen is particularly interesting, in that you have a party (Disney) reaching into the public domain to find gold (Frozen), yet still fighting tooth and nail to keep its own properties out of the public domain. There's a wonderful irony there.

On a separate note: Hans Christian Andersen and/or his heirs absolutely deserved a royalty from any profits earned off of "The Snow Queen" during the lifetime of their copyright to it. By any legal measure, that lifetime had come and gone by the time Disney got around to making Frozen.

[1] To the best of my understanding (IANAL), current US copyright law holds that a creator of a work owns the copyright for his or her lifetime, plus 50 years after his or her death -- during which time the copyright passes to whomever the creator designated as an heir. After those 50 posthumous years are over, the work becomes public domain. I'll admit, however, that I have no idea what copyright law looked like in Denmark in 1844. :)

It isn't ironic at all, and I think you are missing the point. A Disney property entering the public domain is a bad thing for Disney. Yes, people can make money off public domain properties. If a Disney property enters public domain then people other than Disney can make money.

Respectfully, I think you're missing my point. I don't disagree with anything you've just written, and nor do my prior posts.

"If a Disney property enters public domain then people other than Disney can make money."

Correct. And Disney argues the opposite: that, if its properties enter the public domain, they'll be devalued. Nobody will want to make money off of them. Hence, my point that Disney (and others who champion the anti-public domain argument) is wrong about that. Case in point: Disney itself, who makes a lot of money reviving old public-domain properties. When it comes to the public domain, Disney wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It happily revitalizes and capitalizes on properties in the public domain -- then it turns around and argues that its own properties should never enter the public domain, because the public domain is a deadpool. That argument is silly on its face, and Disney is living proof of it.

For your convenience:

http://amzn.com/B00LT1JHLW - $175 for Blu-Ray, $135 for DVD

To be released November 11.

I just searched the Pirate Bay, and found all ~20GB of the original series available, for free (single magnet link).

If you forget you're competing with free in the marketplace, you've already lost.

I just paid $90 to pre-order the new Cowboy Bebop blu-ray box set, despite already having the series on DVD and it being easily found on TPB.

Some of us like owning the actual product.

Why?

Specifically why buy the same thing over again, you already paid to be able to watch it.

You appear to have too much money.

Because I want to legally watch one of my favorite series in the highest quality format available.

When your hourly pay gets high enough and/or you get interested enough in other things, it's cheaper & easier to just shell out $175 for the complete BD package. Fiddling with torrents (with corrupted/bogus links & content, delays, technical obscurities, assuredly illegal activity, etc) is not free, it's spending time & resources & risks which could be used for earning more than $175.

It's pretty difficult for me to imagine getting paid enough that purchasing the Blu-ray would be easier. I would basically have to have an assistant who can place the order, receive the discs, and rip them into a (DRM-free) digital format so that I can watch them on a computer or mobile device, which is how I prefer to consume all of my content (except for the cinema).

I think the more immediate point here is that if you want to watch it right now, the $175 won't get you anything at all; it's not for sale yet. BitTorrent might be less convenient than just buying something, but it's much more convenient than being legally unable to buy something because it hasn't been released yet, and might never be in your market.

If the studios allowed me to copy their content to my media server so I can stream on any device in my house then I might agree 100%. It doesn't need to be HD or even 720p, I'd settle for your bog standard ~220MB/episode x264. But their efforts to frustrate my efforts doing that means I still hit up the torrents to get my DRM free digital copy - despite paying for the media.

I'd settle for a fast enough internet connection and Netflix. I SHOULD have Gigabit to my house for cheap but.. reasons.

Dissenters: yes, there are exceptions. I might absolutely insist on particular formats, spending more to hire an assistant to transfer discs to DRM-free despite the package including iTunes/Windows-Media/UltraViolet downloads providing clean transfers in convenient formats. I might have a sudden compulsion to watch 120 episodes of a half-century-old TV show right now (overnight delivery for $4 intolerable!), crappy amateur transfers from pre-VHS videotape being entirely tolerable on my HDTV.

But nigh unto all customers aren't so pedantic and technical. Most don't even know what "torrents" are. Most have a library of DVD/BD discs & multiple players and few qualms about expanding it. Most of those wanting digital versions are capable of following simple directions to download the included high-quality digital transfers, and find little value in DRM-free versions when the provided formats work just fine on what most people have. And most viewers won't be squeamish about shelling out a buck-fifty per episode.

Yeah, I used to share such pedantic geeky views. Then I discovered I had other things to do and get wound up about, having been burned too often by technical difficulties and crappy rips. For a few taps and a few hours' pay, I'll get the complete collection - in convenient & pristine form - in time for a mind-searing weekend of '60s campy superheros.

ETA: ok, it releases 11/11. We're talking '60s Batman, I can wait a couple weeks. For those vanishingly small number of people who can't, well, there's always torrents of crummy transfers from ancient videotape recorders.

Exactly. If your time has so little value that you will jump through hoops to get it for free then there is no money there, you will never be a customer. You can be disregarded from a business perspective. It is a strange win-win.

I think - I hope - that downloading a show you already own on BD is legal. I buy the DVD/BD's but I only watch shows I have downloaded. It is just more convenient, I hate fussing with DVDs.

You can't compete with free piracy for digital products, period.

Legitimate retail isn't in competition with the pirate bay.

Of course you can compete with free piracy for digital products. If you couldn't, then I wouldn't purchase any piratable digital products, but I absolutely do. iTunes, for example, is in many cases much quicker, more convenient, and more reliable than pirating music. Likewise with Kindle e-books.

So wait, is piracy hurting artists or not? I always have trouble remembering which argument is being invoked to justify "taking stuff for free" this week.

None of that sounds like the point I was making, but since you asked, I would guess that piracy hurts some artists and helps others.

Of course you can, look at the wild success of Steam and iTunes. They've created billion dollar businesses out of being more convenient than the free alternatives.

These services, and every other retail platform is absolutely in competition with grey and black market competitors. Why do you think the RIAA/MPAA/etc. try so hard to shut them down?

Steam and itunes are wildly successful because they are easier and cheaper than bestbuy and samgoodie.

People who want to pirate can download MP3's and PC games with ease. Some of the most pirated games are on steam. Headphones (sickbeard for music) makes pirating music even easier than iTunes.

>Why do you think the RIAA/MPAA/etc. try so hard to shut them down?

Because piracy costs them sales. It's still not competition when you take the product without paying for it.

I don't think that's true, and I don't thing e.g. Apple does, which is why they pushed so hard for DRM free music. I think they know perfectly well that if DRM protected content offers a worse user experience than pirated material, people will pirate instead of buying. The success of Napster proved this.

However, offering a reasonably priced, easy to use and hassle free customer experience has a lot of value, which people are prepared to pay for. The success of the iTunes store proves this.

You can compete on quality control. Pirate media has a tendency to be shoddy. Metadata is missing or incorrect, audic/video quality is poor, special features are missing, books in particular often have missing formatting or are just crappy image scans, with or without dodgy OCR.

If you pay for something, though, you are ~98% certain to get the expected and intended quality.

If you're not respecting other peoples' property rights, it's not a "marketplace" it's the state of nature.

A free pirate copy isn't really in the marketplace, notwithstanding the manifest flaws in our system of administering legal copyright. If we admit this as normal commerce, how is it functionally different from uncompensated eminent domain? where is the incentive to produce if one cannot exert any control over the distribution and sale of creative works?

Sure, everyone who worked on Batman got paid years ago. But if I want to produce a film tomorrow, I'm facing essentially the same problem - I can't compete with free, and that makes it harder to recoup an investment. If I don't have an existing franchise to leverage so as to raise capital advance, then distribution rights are the only tool I have.

> where is the incentive to produce if one cannot exert any control over the distribution and sale of creative works?

Believe it or not, people were creating art before copyright existed.

True, but mostly under a system of patronage. Much art is time-consuming to create and requires special materials and/or skills, which involve a significant economic investment. That's especially true for film and TV.

> True, but mostly under a system of patronage. Much art is time-consuming to create and requires special materials and/or skills, which involve a significant economic investment.

Which is also true with copyright. For the kind of art you discuss, insofar as their is an economic inducement to create complex art from copyright, it is an indirect inducement (since the actual artists still can't afford the up-front costs) that induces patronage.

Things have changed in how we produce and utilize art a little in the 300+ years since then.

Back then, it took as much time and effort and money, and almost as much skill and talent, to copy art as it did to create new art.

Ordinary could not afford copies of art. The wealthy and powerful patrons that could afford to have art made wanted original works, not copies of existing works--they were buying art to show off the wealth and success of themselves or of the region they ruled, and copying someone else's art would do a poor job of that.

Also, art tended to be the work of a single artist (with possibly a handful of assistants). They generally did not have anything on the scale of a modern movie or television show or video game.

While I believe that torrenting is your right, no matter what the law says, some of us do want to shower people responsible for things we like with actual money. If you find the price too steep, then by all means - get it from the pirate bay, from kickass torrents, from isohunt, etc. and show it to all your friends.

Nobody has a right to other people's works just because they're easily digitized.

Reminds me a lot of one of my favorite documentaries - "Los Angeles Plays Itself". The film is an essay on how LA is depicted in film through its architecture.

It was finished in 2003, but because the film is made up of a ton of film clips, it took more than ten years to get it on DVD. The reason was no publisher was willing to take on the mess of getting permission for all those clips.

Just in case you're interested: http://dailytrojan.com/2014/10/20/los-angeles-plays-itself-u...

Glad to see this series finally made it to DVD. My brother was a huge fan, and I'm not sure he knows this is going to be out in time for Christmas. Should be a great Christmas!

Whenever someone asks why Netflix/Amazon/iTunes doesn't have a show, I'm just going to point them at this article and say, "the licensing rights to pretty much every show are this byzantine".

I think we wont see Northern Exposure in any non-physical, digital format in my life time because of all the crazy rights involved with the show. :(

Yeah, same for Cold Case due to the background music, which was licensed only for TV broadcast...

Which is also why we don't get a good release of WKRP. It leads to the idiocy of no money coming in is better than some money coming in.

This is one that bugs me to no end. It's a great show and so sad it'll never come to DVD/BluRay

There are higher-quality TV rips available... but seriously, I'd rather buy a box set than downloading via weirdo 1-click-hosters.

Even now that there are finally published DVD's -- I guess this is some years ago, already -- I find they aren't worth it. Because they removed so much of the original music. I remember watching the first episode and wondering, "What the hell is wrong with this?" Then it clicked.

As far as I am concerned, I think this is downright wrong. "Northern Exposure" -- pop culture though it might be labeled by some -- was a significant contribution to contemporary culture for many of us. It was one of those "water cooler" shows, around which everyone would be discussing it in the days following broadcast.

The fact that a private entity can simply "remove" such a element from our public culture and ongoing conversation -- or edit it into something else -- is, in my opinion, not something that was intended with "intellectual property".

Paying a reasonable fee is one thing. No (legal) access, whatsoever? That should not be permitted.

P.S. For those who are not familiar with it, in "Northern Exposure" a thoughtful and thematic selection of music became akin to another (omni-present) character. Removing those choices is akin to ripping (editing) a major character right out of the finished work.

Hell, I can't even watch "House" on Netflix because of the removal of Massive Attack's "Teardrop" as the theme music. Ditto with the later seasons of Married with Children and the god-awful Joe Cocker impersonator they got for "The Wonder Years"

I already see a compilation of all seasons, just click a certain magnet link and you're good to go.

That's sort of irrational, since the availability of many other shows for streaming serves as a counterexample. Usually* the scope of ownership and transferability of rights is defined very very tightly in media contracts. When you have a lot of people with a potential claim then you run into the holdout problem, succinctly summarized here: http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/810/game-theory-st...

* but obviously, not always, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.

This is especially true in markets outside the US. Wonder why your favourite show isn't on the local equivalent of Netflix (or why you can't get a non-dubbed version if you live in a non-English speaking country)? Licensing.

This kind of stuff happens and it can cause long delays. I recall there were issues with Heavy Metal getting released on DVD due to licensing,as well as Miami Vice.

Amazingly, a group managed to clear all the music rights that held up WKRP in Cincinnati all of these years. A new DVD set was launched last week with most (all?) of the original music intact:

http://music-mix.ew.com/2014/09/15/wkrp-in-cincinnati-dvd-so...

tl;dr: lawyers and money.

(The article is a good read though.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com