Why I hate media producers
p2pnet special: Everyone has at least one story they remember from their childhood, maybe from a picture or comic book, a television series or a movie. In later life we look back fondly on those stories, thinking "Wow! I remember that!" as we see them sitting on the shelves of a bookshop or a video store. Or increasingly online, where we suddenly find there are thousands of other people who remember those stories and who congregate in message boards or newsites dedicated solely to keeping them alive.
My little ball of childhood glee is Wind In The Willows, made by the legendary British studio Cosgrove Hall.
Continuing on from their 1983 movie of Kenneth Grahame’s classic childrens book, Cosgrove Hall developed Wind In The Willows into a highly successful and award winning stop motion series (stop motion animation? Think Wallace & Gromit). In fact they made, five 13-episode series out of it, plus another full length movie. Cosgrove Hall managed to the seemingly impossible: take a much loved classic and do a screen version that was faithful to the book. It won awards. It was lauded in the press. Princess Margaret turned up for the premiere.
I remember my mother liking it, too, because it was one of the few shows on television that was guaranteed to contain absolutely no swearing, violence, dangerous stunts or anything else that might influence a young mind for the worse.
She (illegally) made compilation tapes of the series as they aired on TV and I’d watch them over and over again. Over the years, those old VHS tapes degraded or were accidentally taped over so now I only have four and a half barely watchable episodes out of the sixty five that were made.
Now, after more than 20 years, thousands of production hours and millions of happy children, you’d think you’d be able to buy Wind In The Willows on DVD, wouldn’t you?
Well, you can’t. The original movie was released in 2004 by A&E Home Video. Series 1 was only released on DVD less than a year ago. Series 2 made it a few months later. A&E plan on releasing the second movie in a few weeks time but, get this, don’t really feel like releasing series 3, 4 or 5. Oh, and any/all DVDs released will be Region 1 encoded, with no plans to even distribute them outside of North America and Canada.
This is why I hate media producers with a passion. To a Wind In The Willows fan like myself, this is akin to only releasing the first two Lord of the Rings movies on DVD, or George Lucas deciding that he’s not going to release The Empire Strikes Back in a Collectors Edition Star Wars boxed set. Over the years various companies have taken Wind In The Willows and done the usual release-three-random-episodes-and-forget-about-it routine, but this is the first time anyone has released entire seasons at a time. Now they don’t think the "demand" will remain steady.
Well, considering the fact you can convert anything from analogue to digital with less than $500 worth of equipment and software, what is the damned problem here? Hell, give the master tapes to me and I’ll do it for free. If you can’t be bothered making pretty packaging and sending out stock to hundreds of shops, why not make an .iso file and release the content via BitTorrent? I gather there are a number of torrent sites around who’d just love to distribute legal content, even if few people in the media business actually care about it.
Content producers are so blasé about their damned important intellectual property it never fails to astound me.
Take the BBC as a prime example.
During the 60s and 70s they managed to wipe thousands of programmes by taping over them. Tape was expensive and, well, nobody really wanted to watch this stuff again, did they?
To this day, there are huge holes in the BBC archives where episodes Dr Who, Z-Cars and Dad’s Army should be, but aren’t because nobody could be bothered storing them. Well guess what? People do want to watch this stuff again.
People buy boxed sets of TV shows. People buy boxed sets of old TV shows. People dedicate hours and hours of their free time trying to track down missing episodes of progammes like The Goon Show in some strange kind of modern day media treasure hunt.
We don’t need great catastrophies like nuclear war or global warming to destroy our culture. All we need to do is let the media companies store it for us and everything will be gone in a few decades.
(PS. If any p2pnet readers can spare the time to email A&E – click Contact Us at the bottom of the page. I’d be personally very grateful – this is one programme that I’d like to see passed down to the next generation.)
Alex H, p2pnet – Sydney, Australia
[Alex is an operations manager for an ATM (automatic teller machine) supplier and he specialises in infrastructure development and maintenance, and logistics. He’s also an[other] active member of the Shareaza community. You’ll find previous p2pnet posts, as well as other good stuff, on Alex’s Tech Loves Art blog.]
March 7th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly; I think part of the “bargain” between consumers agreeing to pay for content and producers making it available, should be that the producers agree to actually make available any existing content that a consumer wants. There can be no rational excuse for withdrawing content from sale or refusing to offer it, unless it somehow fails new standards of acceptability.
March 7th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
…George Lucas deciding that he’s not going to release The Empire Strikes Back in a Collectors Edition Star Wars boxed set.
Or not releasing the ORIGINAL Star wars episodes on DVD. The ones without the digital junk added to it.
If they’re not going to try to make money on something, they don’t need or deserve a copyright on it.
March 7th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
While it may take “$500 of software” to convert a show to DVD it takes a lot more than that to actually do the job… like the playback decks are in the $hundreds an hour, high quality digitizing is hundreds an hour, quality compression also takes a skilled (expensive) employee and either expensive hardware or long render times in software.
Then the disc has to be authored.
Specious arguments do not help what is otherwise a reasonably sound story. It may be that the cost of producing the DVD, and the minimum run of 1000 discs, isn’t going to be covered by the demand as evidenced by the purchases of Season 1 and Season 2 on DVD.
Philip
March 7th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
You have a point.
However, sales may have been much better had they not limited availability to region 1…especially since it was created by a British studio and Great Britain is region 2! Hello!
I think it is ridiculous for them to hold onto the copyright to content if they aren’t going to do anything with it. If they aren’t going to use it, release it to the public domain! Let the fans do the work. How does the copyright serve anyone if no one ever gets to see it again?
It’s like cleaning out the attic. If you can’t use what you find up there, you can either: leave it sitting up there gathering dust; throw it out; or donate it to the needy who can get some use out of it. Which of these scenarios is most beneficial?
March 8th, 2006 at 1:24 am
DVD Region free matey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
March 8th, 2006 at 2:44 am
I agree. If a company wants to get or more probably extend their copyright on something they should have to prove they are actively promoting and making money off the product. Even down to individual pieces of the content, eg episodes of a series, or one out of a dozen action figures. If it’s not being promoted or at least sold, it’s made public domain.
Of course a law like that would be quickly bri….errr… lobbied out of existence, but i think the attempt should be made. The fact that it’s illegal to try and get copies of content made by companies that haven’t existed for over 10 or more years is ridiculous. And the fact that ppl buy up old IP intending to do nothing with it other than sue “infringers” is also ridiculous.
Sell it or lose it.
March 8th, 2006 at 9:58 am
I much agree with the subject of this post. Especially in music this sort of thing goes on and on. Everytime there is a media format change, some artists don’t make the cut. So you never hear of them again.
This is where the value of p2p actually comes in. Artists, whose work you can no longer buy for love nor money are still available there. It’s just about the only place besides getting lucky and blundering into to them in a backyard sale. When was the last time you saw a copy of say, “The Archies”, The Royal Guardsmen, or “1910 Fruit Gum Company” being sold new? While most will I am sure agree with me that not all the works of those groups were anything but filler, each had a hit that is almost unknown today, yet the copyright is still being held on them.
If it is that copyright is to be extended so long, it should also be a requirement of the holder to maintain a copy for public domain at the expiration time of the copyright. There is nothing that prevents any holder from just chunking the work to make room in the archives for some thing new and of commerial value.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Make them give a copy to a third party for safe keeping. Like a registered “copyright holder trust” which must hand over their archive to another trust if they ever deregister as a trust.
Unles there is a copy wit hsome kind of third party the copyright holder could “accidentally” lose their copy if they can’t be bothered holding on to it. What happens then? Do they pay a $100 fine and are forgiven? Some corporate bean counter would work out that it would be cheaper to pay the fine than hold the copies and the content doesn’t exist anymore.
I’d still prefer the community archive that decentralized p2p provides us. There is always SOMEONE out there who will hold a copy on their server, like the Internet Archive who do it for everyone’s benefit.