Why preserve what you wish not to remember.
Why preserve what you wish not to remember.
Because someone else might want to remember
which is funny, as who is going to watch all of this older content? younger generations do not watch older content. there's so much content being made daily that there's not enough time to watch old stuff even if it might be of interest. they just wait for it to be remade.
Ml training for example.
"Generate cartoon in style of"
I don't know why, but my knee-jerk reaction is that this is the worst use of the material.
Why is that? Anyone else with that opinion able to put into words the reason? Because I'm not really sure why I think that, but I do.
No clue what your problem is with it.
Old material always has some use an we do live in a timeless time now.
Reusing the lid and getting inspired by it is part of humans creativity
you're definitely not winning me over with this
Tell that to the all the young people at Mrs. Roper Romp Drag Queen Parties.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/22/arts/television/mrs-roper...
How about a link people can actually read?
Eternal cloudflare captcha loop. I’ve never actually seen one of these in the wild. I hit the “I’m not a robot” checkbox, half second later the page reloads with the same checkbox.
You have to check "I'm not a Roper"! ;)
PS: Thank you bacchusracine!
Twillingate was a bit brighter with these Mrs. Roper wannabes for a pub crawl, complete with muumuus:
Stop caring about that ignorant crowd.
who is going to watch all of this older content?
Historians, archivists, and everyone who is interested in having access to the past.
Wedoenjoy old stuff. And it still deserves to be preserved even if nobody did. It does not matter if not a single person on this earth watches that content, human beings toiled to create it and therefore it does not deserve to be lost to the mists of time.
Most content, new or old, is slop not worth watching. And since there are more content from the past than in the present, that means most content worth watching will be from the past.
Do you limit yourself to reading books released in 2023, or do you give any book a chance regardless of age? Most of the greatest books ever written were not first published this year!
I've downloaded shows created before both my parents were even born, and some others not as old but still older than me. I don't think it's the norm but I doubt it's that uncommon
I very well might. My parents watched Doctor Who religiously in their 20s/30s, and I watched some of it in syndication with them when I was a kid. I never got into the 21st century version of it, though. But being able to watch the old stuff would be a connection back to my parents that I would love to have.
There are probably some people (other than historians) into that stuff.
For a parallel example, the earliest records of anime stretch back to winter 1917 (!), though no-one has recordings of those any more:
https://anidb.net/anime/season/1917/winter/?do=calendar&h=1
Some of the slightly newer anime (summer 1917!)usedto be on YouTube but the account seems to have been deleted. Unsure if by YouTube or by the account holder:
*https://anidb.net/forum/thread/10412#c461218
This account on YouTube seems to have a bunch of anime from around that period, along with some modern stuff too:
My kids like the silent movies I’ve shown them enough that sometimes they ask to watch another, unprompted. And I gladly watch talkies with them, too, it’s not like this is one of those “they only suffer it to spend time with dad” things.
I wasn’t born when those came out, either. Myparentsweren’t born when those played in theaters, for that matter. For many, neither were my grandparents.
I watch TV shows from before I was born, pretty often.
Two gems (among many)...
Periscope Films (on YouTube):https://m.youtube.com/@PeriscopeFilm/playlists
Digitized 40-60s era reels. It still amazes me how effectively they presented complex topics then. E.g. mechanical naval gunnery computers:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug
And this on-the-ground movie on the Columbia student occupation in 1968:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BUcYLuGiL_s
younger generations do not watch older content
This is completely false.
I was literally just searching for an episode of The Fifth Estate from 1988 a week ago. A current events/documentary show is never going to get remade.
There's plenty of reasons that people watch old shows. Even on streaming services, the biggest shows seem to be older stuff like The Office, Seinfeld, Friends, etc. Seinfeld will never get remade, and Friends and the Office might, but will not in any way reflect the original.
Going to youtube its pretty clear that there is plenty of demand for old shows: Secrets of War, an obscure 90s era cable documentary show has millions of views across the episodes they uploaded.
Researchers.
So you've never watched an old film? Listened to music from before you were born? Read a book from before you were born?
There was more than enough of this stuff when I was young, but instead of watching police academy 26 I watched something actually good.
which is funny, as who is going to watch all of this older content? younger generations do not watch older content.
That's pretty obviously false. People watch old episodes of, to name two easy examples, Johnny Carson or the Letterman Show. Whether that's to see a comedian (eg Rodney Dangerfield) or a band perform on Letterman, and so on. People love to watch old episodes of SNL, and we know that by the enormous view counts. They love to watch old music videos from before their time.
People were funny in the past, too. Bands were great in the past, too.
People watch older content all the time.
younger generations do not watch older content
Care to quantify that? It's not 0%.
Even 1% of view time thrown at older content is a lot of hours.
Americans watch something like 1.5 billion hours of video per day when we combine TV and internet.
If we look at the broadcast channels in the US, and estimate they put out 20 hours of shows on the average day, then a historic archive 70 years deep would have half a million hours of video.
If one tenth of one percent of view time went to old broadcast shows in particular, then that's 3x the archive size daily and 1000x the archive size yearly.
And all the standard definition content combined would be well under a petabyte.
Younger people will watch it when it gets spoofed and meme'd. Tiktok is massively overrun with people watching things and reacting to them, I'm sure a genre of MST3k style reaction videos to cheesy old content would do well there.
The current state of affairs is a real shame.
The guys behind the Curiosity Show bought all the episodes and are uploading them to youtube. Great science show for kids. I've never seen a better kids science show.
They watch it themselves (and sometimes make reaction videos to it). They watch it with their parents. They watch it as part of a class. They study history and watch it. There are so many ways in which this statement is demonstrably false.
And that someone else may be future me
Maybe you don't value history, but many people do. The point isn't entertainment, or the kind of entertainment you're imagining. Of course this won't compete on the streaming market. The point is that it is a time capsule of an age we've already forgotten.
I think most people also concluded that this was statement of my personal position. It certainly is not.
Oh, just trolling then?
I believe it's called 'playing devils advocate' or in this case sarcasm.
Unfortunately sarcasm doesn't come across very well on the internet.
Did you not intend for people to conclude this to be your personal position? Because there are ways to communicate that more clearly.
Because you don't create the future by destroying the past.
Because you (making the decision) do not speak for the generations that will follow. In making that decision you are (arrogantly) assuming that you know the minds of all those that will follow and that they will agree with your assessment that "there's nothing to see here".
Perhaps you meant in the sense of a deliberate memory hole (in the Orwellian sense), in other words eliminating that which you don't want others to discover.
There's a Quebec kid tv show "Une grenade avec ca" I really liked when I was a teenager and at some point one of the main actors got prosecuted for possession of child pornography, so they pulled out all the episodes he played in... which is basically every single episode I ever watched.
I understand their decision to not air those, but it still feels like a part of my childhood got erased and I wish I could get a copy of those episodes.
These collectors were seen as criminals, but now we can see they are really saviours. An amnesty would stop them being frightened of prosecution,” he said.
The UK is unusual in that it has no statute of limitations for most crimes besides "summary offenses" (equivalent to US misdemeanors):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_periods_in_the_Unit...
Is that unusual among all the countries of the world? Or is the US unusual for having a statute of limitations?
Most countries have statues of limitations for criminal offenses.
It makes sense - imagine trying to defend yourself against an case where the police has been sitting on evidence for 50 years, and anyoneyoucould call in your defense is long-dead.
It’s not clear to me why we should have a hard and fast statute of limitations for that reason instead of simply factoring it in when deciding whether the prosecution has proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
In adversarial systems, the prosecution's objective isn't to reach a truth, but instead to fight to convict you. This incentivises dirty tricks, misrepresentation of facts, and ultimately the full force of state resources looking at putting you behind bars. And during this whole process you are often locked up anyways for this process, independent of actual guilt.
In that model and imbalance of resources, having statue of limitations in place alleviates the need for defendents to, for example, keep records of their actions and reasoning for 30+ years. How would you navigate being charged for tax evasion from 35 years ago, for example?
EDIT: to be clear, I don't think this is necessarily a precise defense of statuetes of limitations specifically, just a "well they're not a bad idea" sort of defense
Are there any examples of a country with a non-adversarial Justice model?
Inquisitorial systems (more present in civil law systems big also present in some US courts) have the judge act as a fact finder. In that model the judge is basically an active participant in figuring out what happens, instead of just being a referee in between two parties. So the judge (a professional whose job it is to do this) is more of an active participant and a determiner of guilt rather than 12 randos off the street (modulo a bunch of stuff). This leads to things like guilty plea bargains not being as much of a thing if the judge doesn’t believe the confession.
Source: I read the Wikipedia article on inquisitorial systems and watch tv. So I don’t know what I’m talking about but it sounds nice (also aligns with what I’ve heard about French court procedure) I think this covers Japan too (anyone who plays phoenix wright might wonder: why is the judge just declaring a result?)
Most countries in Europe and Latin America:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisitorial_system
Amen, brother. You hit the nail on the head with this one. Going to get all the charges against me dismissed by the prosecutor tomorrow, but took ten years of being in jail, waiting for trial, before they came to that decision. The system is broken :(
> In that model and imbalance
> of resources, having statue
> of limitations[...]
The same could be said foranybit of courtroom procedure. Why forbid a prosecutor from making an illegal inference, or entering illegal evidence, when you can just instruct the jury after-the-fact to disregard it?
The jury doesn't just live in a vaccum.There are rules for what kind of evidence is admissible to them, and we don't just leave it to the jury to yolo it.
Sometimes, those rules don't make 100% sense. That's the case with any set of rules (Especially ones surrounding legal procedure!). We set rules, because we think that they are a good idea most of the time.
And most of the time, for most crimes, the tradeoff between trying a decades-old case, and of preventing the harassment of an innocent person over a decades-old-case leans towards the latter.
How much doubt must a juror sow into their mind in order for it to be a fair trial?
Remembering that the most severe crimes usually have no statute of limitations, one strong case for having them is so people can move on from their past without fear a minor, unprosecuted crime will come back to haunt them.
One argument for a statute of limitations is fading human memory, but I don't see how that's the case here, from the article:
"Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels. [...] “The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out."
I think making this an offense is insane, but I don't see how these cases are any more ambiguous than if the same happened yesterday.
The question is whether the owner of property has a right to order its destruction, and whether an employee (or equivalent) is stealing or legitimately salvaging if they "rescue" said property from the trash.
Legal or not, the BBC obviously put a value of zero on these things when they threw them away.
So who has lost, what value needs to be recovered? There's no reasonable reason for anyone to pursue legal action, it would just be vexatious and / or a waste of tax payer money.
You don’t need a loss to occur for there to be a crime “the trump defense”
If I break into your house, eat your food, but leave money on the counter for the same value, you didn’t make a loss, but I’m sure you would want me to be arrested
The loss here is the psychological impact of knowing your home has been violated, and thereby feeling less safe. Which is quite substantial for many.
Yes the crime of breaking and entering.
If I took a piece of potato peel out of your bin that was on the pavement, that might technically be a crime (I don't know). But are you going to pursue a civil suit? What compensation are you going to get?
Are the police or CPS going to prosecute? Is it in the national interest? Or are they wasting resources for no reason.
The BBC are in no way being harmed by someone who has permission to be on the premises taking something that the BBC literally believes to be rubbish.
There's a legal concept of irrationality. This would seem to be an example of that.
There's no reasonable reason for anyone to pursue legal action,
Yes, I agree with you, but clearly this is illegal in the UK. I'm only narrowly commenting on how in this case the passage of time doesn't seem to have impacted anyone's ability to discern the facts of the case.
In the US it’s legally clear that if it’s in the trash it’s fair game. Your employer could fire you if they catch you, but, the police for example are allowed to rummage your bin without a warrant if it’s out on the curb. And they base that on the expectation that hobos and everyone else is doing it already, so, it’s normalized here.
On the other hand an employee probably wouldn’t get the copyright etc, it’s still their intellectual property, it’s just a rare collectible item that got thrown away and is now properly recognized.
It also allows the police to throw stuff out. If you want to prosecute, you need the evidence, but keeping evidence forever means litteral warehouses of evidence. It gets expensive quickly.
He should give the tapes to the British museum out of spite. They BBC will never get the back and the British Museum doesn't care what crimes were committed as long as their collection grows.
Send the tapes to Greece, Egypt, Nigeria, what-have-you.
Perfect.
Why is the BBC being weird about it?
There have been a lot of attempts to extort money out of the BBC by people falsely claiming that they have lost episodes over the years, they may simply not believe these claims are as credible as the article suggests.
That doesn't make any sense. OP is about reports that BBC refuses to make any legal promises and talk only vaguely about cooperating with owners, when it would be so easy for them to simply publicly promise to not prosecute material stole before, say, 1990. Obviously, granting 'an amnesty for stolen episodes' is even easier for fake episodes which were never stolen in the first place... The credibility of the claims is irrelevant.
The BBC does not have any discretion over who is prosecuted for a crime though. They can give their opinion but it's up to the police. So a public promise doesn't actually hold any weight.
They don’t? In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something.
Is that not the case in the UK? Can you be charged because the DA read about a hypothetical crime in the bews?
You can absolutely be arrested and charged for that in the US. The police just generally don't because failure in court is nigh-guaranteed with an uncooperative key witness.
Yeah, sure, you can be arrested for anything or nothing at all. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
Do you have any examples of charges and convictions on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good or service from an owner? Or are we just being pedantic?
Well, sure, here's a quick example of an uncooperative victim and the state attempting (and in this case failing) to prosecute on robbery charges anyway:https://www.norwichbulletin.com/story/news/crime/2009/03/21/...
“charges and convictions” was not an inclusive-or statement
You claimed “In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something.”
Then you shifted the goalposts to “charges and convictions”.
Yes I did. Which I clarified because a pedantic ball flew over the first goal post.
You asked "Do you have any examples of charges and convictions on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good or service from an owner?"
The real question is do you have an example of a judge ruling that someone can't be charged and convicted on theft without a prior claim of deprivation to a good and service from an owner? Because I'm pretty sure you are wrong.
If you were correct about your belief, I'm sure you can find an example of someone charged with murder and theft, and the theft charges being thrown out because the victim is unavailable to say something was stolen.
I guess in your imagination I can steal money from the wallet of a person in a coma in front of a cop, and get off scot free, since the victim can't testify against me?
In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something.
Not sure it was that simple in, for example, the case where Aaron Swartz 'stole' articles from JSTOR. JSTOR declined to press charges, but the prosecutor went berserk with self-righteous bloodlust, and well, we all know how that turned out.
Someone would have to tell the police about it though.
A public promise holds plenty of weight - assuming it's legal in the UK for some police busybody to prosecute on the BBC's behalf without the BBC's consent, it is nevertheless hard to prosecute a crime when your 'victim' is strenuously criticizing you publicly for it and refusing to cooperate. And if you were right that it was so easy and meant so little, then all the more reason to make that public promise, no?
Going forward, it would seem like a good idea for the UK government to stop treating the removal of items from garbage bins as a crime. I'm no lawyer, but a quick web search suggests that nowhere in the US is "dumpster diving" considered illegal.
Oh believe me, it's more than considered illegal. It is literally illegal.
OP is about reports that BBC refuses to make any legal promises and talk only vaguely about cooperating with owners, when it would be so easy for them to simply publicly promise to not prosecute material stole before, say, 1990.
I'm not sure I buy the article's premise that this is the main issue to be honest. My understanding is that the main problem is simply that some of the people involved just want a bunch of money, and the BBC finds it very hard to countenance why they should pay someone for stuff stolen from them, especially at not very realistic valuations.
In the article: The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out. But if you loved film and knew it would be important one day, what did you do? So what we need now is an amnesty,” he said.
Because someindividualwill have to sign their name on the amnesty.
And no individual in a bureaucracy (British term: jobsworth) is going to stick their neck out without a really solid incentive.
The easiest solution would be to send them anonymously to a third party abroad, who'd then proceed to digitise the tapes, returning the originals to the collectors, and hand the resulting files to the BBC. Setting up a trustable network of anonymous relays crossing jurisdictions for physical goods is the hard part, and tends to attract the wrong kind of attention to the ones involved.
I'm such a third party, could do it.
I could't care less about restoring BBC history if BBC themselves don't care enough to lay down a legal way for this to happen without my help.
This is how it feels to me. Dump them on a pirate site, no reason to give them to the BBC if they have no interest in trying to get them
Are we sure the copyright belongs to BBC and not the royal family?
Excuse my ignorance, but why exactly would the copyright belong to the royal family?
I don't know much either. I don't think the BBC is a government department though, but it's kind of messy.
The easiest solution would be to . . .
That doesn't meet the goal of amnesty.
Before the footage is made available, the people holding that footage have leverage.
Once they share it somehow, the leverage is gone and it's unlikely that they'd be given amnesty. In fact, the act of sharing the footage has some nonzero chance of revealing people . . .
They wouldn’t need amnesty if they can never be identified. Also, they could return the BBCs property anonymously and release the digitised versions after that.
Surely this third party abroad will not alter stored footage with some hidden and pranky details..
As others have said this article is poorly written with the person interviewed saying he was misquoted so nothing in it can be taken as true.
However, there have been very strong rumors for years that 2-3 episodes known to be in the hands of collectors (I believe it was said in a recorded interview with the Radio Free Skaro podcast by someone involved in Classic Who bluray releases)
While some people may be worried about legal implications I suspect that most just would rather keep it. If they really wanted to return it they could hand it off to someone who would be an intermediary. So the real danger is that once they die, whoever inherits their collection may not care about it and junk the whole thing.
>As others have said this article is poorly written with the person interviewed saying he was misquoted so nothing in it can be taken as true.
I’m not finding this claim being made elsewhere in the comments here. Do you have a link?
Listening to the latest episode of Radio Free Skaro they confirm that the rumors were stated on their show and read a quote from the person interviewed for this article who says they were just repeating what they heard of Radio Free Skaro!
That makes more sense to me knowing how this happens in the arcade preservation community. Some people really get off on having 'the only copy' of something.
FYI, archive.org has a bunch of whats been available:
https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s01
https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s02
https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s03_v2
https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s04
https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s05
https://archive.org/details/doctorwho_s06
Holy crap! How long has this been available? Every time I read up on it, finding it was like the thing of legends.
Those aren't lost episodes. They are available on DVD and iPlayer.
Oh, now I got it. Thank you so much for clarifying.
Thanks for this, didn't know these were out there. I started watching as a kid when Jon Pertwee was the doctor and haven't seen most of these.
It says a lot about the state of the BBC that they produce so little sci-fi that this is actually considered news. Look at Netflix, for whom sci-fi/fantasy is the most popular genre of show and as a consequence they invest heavily into it.
The BBC seems to be staffed by an incredibly narrow and stifling cultural homogeneity in which period dramas that appeal to middle aged women are good, but sci-fi shows that appeal to young men aren't even on the radar. Dr Who is notable primarily because it's one of the only recognizable sci-fi shows they ever made, and it's targeted at kids. The others are mostly comedies like Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker's Guide and they're all from decades ago.
One day the BBC is going to lose the license fee and discover it doesn't even know what types of shows are popular, let alone how to make them.
This isn't news because the BBC produces so little sci-fi, it's news because of the popularity and hstorical legacy of Doctor Who specifically. No one (except maybe lost media nerds) would care if this were about Blake's Seven or something.
It's got nothing to do with it being sci-fi, (except that maybe it makes it more likely to end up here) it's because it's popular & has lost episodes. Dad's Army would make the news for it (but maybe notHackerNews, sure) too.
Seems like an article that would have been vastly improved if they had simply put the question about an amnesty directly to the BBC and printed their response.
They did. The BBC carefully avoided saying anything meaningful.
The BBC said it was ready to talk to anyone with lost episodes. “We welcome members of the public contacting us regarding programmes they believe are lost archive recordings, and are happy to work with them to restore lost or missing programmes to the BBC archives,” it said.
I didn't know anything about this; it's quite interesting.
...the infamous arrest of comedian Bob Monkhouse in 1978 has not been forgotten, Franklin suspects: “Monkhouse was a private collector and was accused of pirating videos. He even had some of his archive seized. Sadly people still believe they could have their films confiscated.”
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20180824/282703342...
I mean, if you were in that situation would you trust the legal system not to turn on you?
From Sept 2021 to Aug 2022, "old shows" were watched as much as Apple TV+,https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/fil...
> the Fishers scooped up rights to low-cost, syndicated staples like Forensic Files and Unsolved Mysteries and library titles with strong cult followings, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to The Greatest American Hero and 21 Jump Street.. FilmRise is now the largest independent provider of content to ad-supported streaming platforms.. in the U.S. top 10, with 21.68 billion cumulative minutes streamed .. just behind Apple TV+, with a cumulative 21.7 billion minutes streamed.
Can’t they just announce an amnesty but make it contingent on turning in any illicitly obtained footage to the BBC?
So do these collectors have the ability to play back these recordings? If so, could they at least make some recording (even if pointing a camera while playing back would be better than nothing) to send to the BBC. Otherwise if they have no means to play it back, I fail to understand why they'd not want the opportunity to watch their collection!
Sadly this article is misleading - John Franklin has issued a statement saying that he was misquoted [1] and there is actually an amnesty when handing over missing episodes.
[1]https://twitter.com/drwhopodcasters/status/17233881608669433...
I'd be more interesting in digging up the corpses of incompetent BBC management from back in the day and prosecuting them than any threat to somebody who has archival content--they ought to be well financially rewarded for protecting that content.
Just another example of copyright law being garbage.
Preservers of cultural memory should be rewarded.
Canada spent years digitizing classic TV and published the shows on a Youtube channel, then suddenly deleted all the content without notice to archivers,https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982.
In the absence of social contracts for preservation, we are left with defensive archiving.