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South Park To Be Available Online Free and Legal

Posted by Zonk on from the i-like-the-crazy-future dept.

garnetlion writes "South Park is coming online, free and legal. My brief research has not indicated if it will use DRM, require some silly Windows-only software or be otherwise substandard. According to a Wired blog article, 'Parker and Stone said they were inspired to start the site when they got 'really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.'" In this regard South Park joins fellow Comedy Central notable The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose archive was made freely available online late last year.

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Illegally? by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But they literally have the right to copy their own show (that's the meaning of copyright) so how is it illegal for them? And how is DRM free?

    1. Re:Illegally? by deanlandolt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not sure how their particular deal works, but I think if Comedy Central actually owns the show they make, then they could have actually been criminally breaking the copyright of their own employers and in theory could be sued for it. IANAL, etc. Wow -- it's all almost as illogical as academia, where professors have to beg permission from publishers to distribute their own works to students. Almost.
  2. They don't mind by Apoorv+Khatreja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have been watching South Park since the first season aired on Comedy Central. But then I got bored of waiting for a new episode every week, so I waited for a lot of episodes to pile up and then downloaded them off BitTorrent. Next, I found a site called southparkx.net, which offered news on South Park and offered episode downloads.

    Their FAQs said that "Matt and Trey do not mind when fans download their episodes off the Internet; they feel that its good when people watch the show no matter how they do it." I felt good when I heard this, not because they legalised what I was doing, but because they made a truly great show and didn't believe in all the evil copyright laws.

    Now, when they have offered a service to watch full episodes online, and to make small clips from episodes embeddable, I am a bigger South Park fan than ever.

    --
    RutSum.com