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Re:Pirating the Pirates by cosmic_cheese on Monday September 28, 2026 @02:31PM (#49882362)
Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.
Re:Pirating the Pirates by mahboi on Monday September 28, 2026 @02:33PM (#49882398)
Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.
Re:Pirating the Pirates by someonebaggy on Monday September 28, 2026 @07:07PM (#49885712)
For corps, yes, but destroying history seems a bit far
Re:Pirating the Pirates by account42 on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:21AM (#49963904)
It's not their IP though, the rest of us have only granted them a temporary monopoly and its in our interest that we still have the original works after that time.
Re:Pirating the Pirates by mopsi on Monday September 28, 2026 @03:13PM (#49882973)
Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.

It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.

Re:Pirating the Pirates by xp84 on Monday September 28, 2026 @03:53PM (#49883468)
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.

Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.

Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.

The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.

Re:Pirating the Pirates by crtasm on Monday September 28, 2026 @04:51PM (#49884167)
In the UK Red Dwarf had full series on VHS from 1991, albeit a messy release and taking some years to catch up with what was currently airing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf#Home_video_releases