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Absolutely, if you care about historical works you should make sure that you have a copy that you control.
A large portion of the things on my jellyfin are like that, because once they take away media ownership, and they can change or take away your stories at any time.
Here's a random paranoid tangent before lunch! I was reading recently about the evolution of theater in England over a hundred years from ~1550-1650. Elizabeth ruled during the first part of that interval, and Shakespeare wrote. His plays included perspectives from wide slices of society and were performed for royalty and commoners alike. Elizabeth died and private theatrical commissions began to outgrow public theater, which according to wikipedia "sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades".
Starting in 1642 theaters were closed entirely by act of a Puritanical Parliament. That ban lasted 18 years and once the audience was Quite Thirsty, the English Restoration restored theater abstractly and filled it with bawdy raunch.
Yada yada, Disney then hired a crew of weepy Christian writers in the 20th century to repackage folk tales into Little Mermaid and Iron Man, which seems parallel enough to Shakespeare retelling Ovid. Film flourished, and in the early days of broadcast TV anybody could star in their own very own program. The Writers were on the brink of delivering us Heroes, but they up and left before they could save the cheerleader.
Now this age of regurgitated, computer animated-and-written, crowdsource produced art seems familiar, too. We're filling the gaps with what we know, and the Appalachians wielding the pen are finding gaps they didn't know were there. It's odd being here, but my point is that if we are stuck in a loop then there's the potential that on the horizon is a period of Hollywood producing a bunch of light hearted Boob Comedies.
You honor I object that he interrupted me while watching Ow My Balls!
Someone bought ALL the thrift store DVDs in all my small city’s thrift stores, like four of them. People are starting to know that self-ownership is where everyone is going
The simple answer to this is to change the tax code to not allow for write offs for completed projects. And to shorten how long copyright lasts (fuck Disney so much for that one)
Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.
Personally, I'd also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don't exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.
They're editing entertainment history to begin with. Deletion is bad enough, but possibly even more nefarious is the blatant, unapologetically sneaky editing of existing media mentioned in this thread. Jussst a little bit at a time.
Unlike many videogames, TV shows, music, movies, don't get "version / revision numbers." Can you trust your archives to be original?
Adjust for today's-sensibilities here, remove a now-naughty-word there..."oh, we don't wanna pay for that song that released in 5 years before this 36 year old television program...better it never existed!"
Their goal seems to be relegating the Internet to simply being a flow of "What's trending and making money NOW" and nothing else. Every ~~byte~~ electron has a dollar value.
They want generations growing up in a world where the corporate narrative is all that ever was and will be.
Today it's talk shows and cartoons.
Tomorrow it's biographies and documentaries. Family histories? Newspapers?
We need to stop this NOW.
Media conglomerates can't even be relied on to be stewards of their own legacy. They're coming for ours.
So, who's up for another reread/watch of Farenheit 451 or Equalibrium?
Edits arent exactly new
Han shot first
Fair. Can also cite all the Islamic iconography and sound removed from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
As for Star Wars, Han absolutely shot first. (High five)
Weren't a lot of those wacky edits by Lucas' own whims though? I'd say there's a distinction between a creator editing his own work and say, Disney going "We lost the rights to John Williams, so we removed the score from the entire franchise." Lol
This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.
And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this... and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.
In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.
The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.
Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.
The only way to watch the original Star Wars movies before George completely fucked with them is piracy.
The 4K77, 80 and 83 editions are what you're after. Enjoy. There are apparently reduced noise versions as well, but I thought it was perfect as is. It's old. It's supposed to have noise and grain. The desert scenes in the first one are really noisy and I'm not 100% sure why. Maybe he filmed those on cheaper film stock in smaller cameras, but that's just a guess.
The director was an amateur, and he didn't align the grains of sand with the grain of the film.
It’s not his fault that sand is coarse, rough, and irritating, or that it gets everywhere.
Wait until you realize that most of your favorite movies and shows have been re edited or messed with.
I was watching the office for the 100th time and one of my favorite jokes was just straight up removed from the show during this rewatch. So just in the last few months they've gone back and edited the show.
I was also rewatching breaking bad and they've changed some of the music as well.
Music licensing in media like this gets bullshit quickly. If it was signed in for the original run, fucking leave it.
Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.
I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa...here comes the sick instrumental from "Blow Me Away"...!
...No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.
The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan, but the sheer arrogance to think they have the right to claw audio out of existing works because they're not getting infinite revenue out of it is a new friggin low.
When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn't be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.
Sheesh!
Ace Combat games are also on a countdown as soon as they release, because the likenesses of the planes from the defense companies expire, so they get de-listed.
You couldn't do that with physical media. =\
I had a coworker who cited music licensing as the sole reason he can't find his favorite show anymore: The Drew Carrey Show. Whatever schmuck owns the music licensing refuses to cooperate with the rest of the show owners, so it can't be streamed or distributed anywhere.
Another example would be Scrubs, most of the songs used in the show (including key moments and the OG songs were perfect for them) have been edited out and replaced because of licensing issues. Unless you've got the DVDs or pirated older versions, you're stuck with the new music and it's not the same.
The Drew Carrey Show just finally got a streaming release a couple months ago. On Plex. All 9 seasons now.
I think that's why you'd be hard pressed to find Daria in its original form too: music licensing.
Wait what? What joke? :O That's ridiculous!
Don't know why they cut it honestly since it's been there forever, but when Michael is trying to set people up he sets Kevin up with Erin and when Erin looks disappointed Kevin says:
"you will learn to love me"
Michael: "slow down Kevin, you gotta let the cookies cool before you pop em in your mouth!"
That whole exchange is now gone and you only get Erin's disappointment and her asking Michael if she can talk to him in private. The cookie joke is gone for some reason
I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.
This is why pirating is justified. If you want your shows to last forever, torrent them, and keep them seeded.
I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.
It's likely that most episodes aired before the dawn of home video recording (early 80s) are completely lost media. NBC and other networks weren't in the habit of archiving tape-to-air media.
Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.
It's going to be a fun historical period to look back on when there are just huge gaps where IP/product control became so powerful that no record of certain things were allowed to exist.
Orwell didn't know he was also writing about the Entertainment-Industrial Complex.
Used to be considered simply prudent to back up the vhs tapes you bought and people were encouraged to tape their favorite shows off the tv. Now some random CEO of the month has the right to bury decades worth of creative works?
In the long run, shit like this is theft from the Public Domain.
Yeah, there really should be some expectation of stewardship in exchange for absurd post-Disney copyright durations.
What a brilliant way to put it, "theft from the public domain". I'm gonna have to remember that one.
Can’t keep archives of Saturday morning cartoons we all grew up with and loved; will sue you for keeping copies of them.
Definitely ok to being three mile island back online for AI though, that’s the ticket to a better humanity!
For real why has everyone with any kind of money gone psycho? Have the bad guys started winning even harder?
I'm not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft's AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.
Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content
That's a real bummer, right? It's like all this stuff we love just vanishing into thin air. But honestly, with all the streaming platforms popping up, maybe it's just the dawn of a new way to keep us entertained. It could also be a sign for us to cherish and support physical media while we still can, so start stocking up on DVDs and Blu-rays like it's 2005!
Or just save it to one of those 16tb hard drives we have nowadays. They can't remove it from your own collection either way.
Enshittification continues
The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as "new" while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!