No worries, at least I'm subscribed to Paramount Plus.
Of course I can watch a classic episode of MTV cribs. Wait what's this, they only have the last three seasons!
What about the legendary episode where Redman shows off his authentic home!
This has to be the biggest tragedy to streaming, I can imagine in 10 years or so BoJack horseman won't be palpable to modern audiences. And since Netflix only officially released the first season on DVD, it will effectively become lost media.
There’s a group of renegades doing their best to shore-up the shortcomings of current media retention and make sure such booty remains existent. You should join the crew!
> Not having print copies of a writer’s work is a big mistake.
This is an important thing. People rave about how the internet gives almost everyone immediate access to so many thing, but flip a switch (or stare helplessly as a major CME is hurtling our way) and it's all gone for some amount of time or forever.
Did the proprietors even consider and try to sell those many hours? If nothing else they could've auctioned files for private use. No-one there to make a quick buck that way?
Having it digitally on the internet does not mean that switch flip can take it away, having it encumbered by DRM means that.
DRM free ebooks would/will never just disappear! I attempt to put my money where my mouth is and buy DRM free whenever possible, and consider carefully buying at all if no DRM free copy exists.
You didn't understand me. Computers need electricity, when that electricity is switched off, the entire collection of works becomes inaccessible. This can be a short-term outage or it can be a longer one in case of e.g. a natural disaster.
And it's not true that "ebooks would/will never just disappear"; if you don't proactively care for the health of your storage media, they will fail; from an archival point of view most storage media will almost certainly fail in short order (years, decades at most). I have piles of CDs, floppy disks and hard disks lying around but I am not confident I can access all the data. Rather, I'm sure only a fraction of the files will still be readable.
That's why we need piracy and Reddit data hoarders. Corporations can own our history because of antiquated copyright laws created for sheet music and print books over a century ago.
i don't know much about this specific archive, but in my opinion, this kind of action should be considered criminal damage to human cultural heritage. you shouldn't have to pay to store it yourself, but you should then have to make sure somebody else gets a chance to pay for a copy.
I've seen some YouTube creators delete their past videos when they transition. i understand the desire to distance themselves from their past persona, but again, the content itself doesn't belong to just them anymore - they should be able to profit from it if they want, but they shouldn't be able to destroy it.
I think an "easy" way to manage this would be to require people to submit a DRM free copy of any work they want copyright protections on to the United States Copyright Office who will keep a record of when copyright was applied, contact info for who to reach if you want to negotiate rights for using the work while copyright protections are in effect, a countdown timer showing how long until copyright expires, and once expired a download link for the work available to anyone at any time going forward.
It would mean that people's work wouldn't enjoy copyright protection (or at least not full protections) unless they give all that info to the copyright office, but I think that's a minor trade off for what would quickly become a vast repository of public domain works.
It would show up / compete with their current media efforts, it could potentially still owe residuals of some kind, and deleting it means they can take a tax credit for “lost” revenue.
Corporations are heartless machines. Archival, history, culture, these things are not their priorities. These things are our priorities. If someone else owns your creativity, accept from day 1 that you have no say in what happens to it. Believing otherwise is delusion.
Imo journalists should be allowed and should (honestly I don't know if they are or not, probably not) repost their stories on their own personal websites.
You never have any assurance that the parent company that buys you will care about the same things you care about. More often than not they're looking for particular segments and everything else is just baggage.
Former journalist here. Journalists do this all the time. Back in the print days, we'd keep clips -- literally cut-outs of our articles -- and use them when job-hunting to demonstrate our past work. I've got a stack of clips in a filing cabinet right now. In the digital era, many journalists keep saved versions of their online articles for the same reason. Video journalists often maintain reels for an analogous purpose.
But the big distinction is whether they're kept for personal use or merely republished, in violation of the publisher's copyright. It's OK, for instance, to share some clips with a potential employer so they can evaluate your work. It's not OK to create an mtv-news-unauthorized.com archive site and just republish everything there.
>Imo journalists should be allowed and should (honestly I don't know if they are or not, probably not) repost their stories on their own personal websites.
I get the sentiment, but how is this any different than saying a programmer should be able to keep code they wrote at a company? You don't own it.
>how is ["Imo journalists should be allowed and should (honestly I don't know if they are or not, probably not) repost their stories on their own personal websites."] any different than saying a programmer should be able to keep code they wrote at a company? You don't own it.
Fourth Estate and Public Interest. Journalism and programming in most cases serve different needs. Journalism serves the public interest (in theory).
Less life-and-death with music journalism, but it's still culturally important.
Although tbh, in the case of games and programming of critical importance (safety of life, elections, healthcare, large-scale finance) and cultural importance (games) I wouldn't be against a set of industry-specific regulations that stop the source code being effectively obliterated. Keep it like classified country secrets, consider declassifying it after 30 years.
Right now, the way it works is that you produce code, then you give that code to your employer, and they give you money in exchange for the exclusive use of that code. The code and the money change hands.
What you're proposing is that you produce code, then your employer gives you money in exchange for use of the code -- but you also get to keep the code and do whatever you want with it? Why would an employer agree to that?
It’s my opinion that, barring areas like (for example) nuclear missile guidance software, technologists should generally get to keep their own reference copy of work products.
Before knowledge work was near exclusively performed on computers, it was not uncommon for people to preserve their own reference copy of work they had performed, and it wasn’t all that frowned upon.
Technology exists (for example DLP applied to endpoints by MDM) that enables the (at least ostensible or plausible) prevention of this but it mostly keeps honest people honest.
Because they are rational people who understand that data copied isn't a loss for them, and would rather attract more passionate leftists (if that's what your going for) to work with than people in a wage-slave mentality...
But everyone's going to do what they're going to do... regardless of if it makes sense or not, and having old (materialistic-centric) world views on digital content distribution is something we are going to have to learn to outgrow sooner than later.
Maybe it would jive better with the old school mentality if the diction of 'licensing to the employer' was non-exclusive as a default: resulting in higher wages where an exclusive license is actually required (or legal or moral/ethical reasons).
Being generally open about software makes the wages go up, not down. More of us get more done, faster, while exponentially increasing gains by contributing back. Open Source is the Way.
Because someone realizes of the power disparity between employee and employer, and legislates them into doing it.
Also, realizing that 99% of all code is useless out of context. The value of an e-commerce site, for example, isn't in the code itself that runs the shopping cart and website, but in the relationship with vendors and in the marketing talent to get your site popular compared to others.
If I sell a book to Random House, Random House gives me money in exchange for the publishing rights to the book, but 35 years later under the copyright act reversion clause I can apply for the publishing rights back regardless of what the publishing contract says. Why would Random House agree to publish books?
Your example gives Random House 35 years of exclusive rights. While not indefinite, it's still worth paying for, just as financial options are worth paying for, even though they eventually expire, too.
The grandparent example gives Random House 0 years of exclusive rights, which means the author could directly compete against them from the start.
Or, much shorter reply than my other one: when I was a kid my mother took me to the public library which was a bit away so we took the streetcar. Passengers entered and bought tickets from the tram driver, so I asked my mom, can the driver keep the money he's getting? I found it highly unjustified and unjust he has to turn over the money when his work is done. After all, Labor is entitled to all it produces.
I've been trying to think where else this could apply and can't come up with anything. Farm labour doesn't keep the food, factory labour not the products, shipping not the packages. Accountants not the bank accounts or company ledgers. As a programmer, code that I am paid to produce is not my code to keep. The code wouldn't exist at all if not for the particular business domain that was not mine in the first place.
The example above is also about keeping public clippings of their work that they sold (were paid for). It would be like taking screenshots of a public website or something and that being okay. [added] I also don't know if they can repost a story on a personal website, I would guess the NYT or who ever would not want a paid reporter's website to steal traffic by creating a kind of fan base and probably pay the more well known reporters more than rookies because they drive viewership.
Chefs keeping copies of the recipes they came up with for their employers, screenwriters keeping scripts, authors keeping early drafts, musicians keeping sheet music, photographers keeping prints (if not negatives), any job where someone is expected to keep and maintain a portfolio
Good examples, I seriously could not think of any.
The difference I see is that those are works that are produced on ones own and then sold to buyers (except maybe the chef, I'm not familiar with that area.) Code, in the above context, is not created first and then sold to the business (unless its code/software one own in the first place). It is work that happens after a problem arises and then one is hired to provide a specific business domain solution.
I sympathize but must disagree. The guy you paid to paint a wall—does he own the paint (that you presumably had to pay for, too)? Is he entitled to, what?, the paint on the wall or the fact that this particular paint is sticking to this particular wall in a particular way? Or the fact that's now pink? and when you want to change it to blue later, you have to ask them or negotiate a fee with them? What could that person claim, materially or idealistically?
There's some precedence in that at least over here in Germany, architects have come to maintain a copyright of sorts (actually, Urheberrecht I believe, "creator's right") over the physical architecture they designed. Whether it's opt-in, opt-out or mandated by law I do not know, what I do know is that it made some people very angry when they experienced constant leakage in a building by a famous architect whose name I shall not bring forward here, but who is a complete moron and famous for his leaking designs. All the owners (owners!) of the house wanted was to install a frigging rain gutter, but the architect long declined (he finally did cave in and installed the ugliest stainless-steel 'sculpture' that ever hurt your vision). I'm much more of a preserver than I am a friend of the modern BS that too often replaces sound old structures, but I do not understand owners who agree not to own the building they paid for, including the lawful modification or destruction of it, as the case may be. There have actually been cases where existing structures of a public building had to be torn down when an architect fell out with the stakeholders, just because the guy claimed his rights to the already built—wait for it—four elevator shafts for crying out loud. Judging from that perspective, I can understand anyone who pays for work to be done to play the safe game and make sure all rights are waived by the creator.
In the case of a typical programming job—that's often done collectively. Using a version control system like Git you could probably figure out exactly which character sequences a give programmer put into the—finished? intermediate version of?—product, but don't get me started about the bugs that needed several revisions, or the rights of the project manager whose chose to interfere—erm, help out—during development. Does the PM get rights to character sequences?
The code the programmer wrote is used and turned into (compiled) into a product and those downstream products are used as tools, but for the writer, it's the writing itself that's used directly and published and publicised. If, as a programmer, I'm working on an Open Source project, who keeps the code when I switch corporate masters?
Of course I can watch a classic episode of MTV cribs. Wait what's this, they only have the last three seasons!
What about the legendary episode where Redman shows off his authentic home!
This has to be the biggest tragedy to streaming, I can imagine in 10 years or so BoJack horseman won't be palpable to modern audiences. And since Netflix only officially released the first season on DVD, it will effectively become lost media.