South Park To Be Available Online Free and Legal

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.

Comments

Illegally?

[Brian Gordon]

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?

Re:Illegally?

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Re:Illegally?

[boguslinks]

Dont' assume they have the copyright to the show just because they're the creative guys behind it. When Arthur C. Clarke reprinted a chapter from 2001: A Space Odyssey in the sequel novel, he had to get permission from the publisher of 2001.

Re:Illegally?

[snowraver1]

They don't own it, Viacom owns it.

Re:Illegally?

[zappepcs]

The point is that they and everyone else has no 'legal' way to download it and watch. They are siding with john q. here. If there is no legal way, then everything else must be illegal.

It's not like South Park and The Daily Show are shows that no one has ever heard of before, so it's good to see that mainstream content producers are in agreement with pretty much all the consumers of that content. I hope that it catches on, and with widespread attention in the MSM. There is nothing like some very popular people telling the world that *Hey, this should not be illegal!* to get the ball rolling.

I'm sure there will be more support for such activity when the RIAA finally admits they wasted all the money from the Napster case suing grannies and basically ruining all the good will that the recording industry ever had. Not many artists will continue to support that kind of stupidity when it gets rubbed in their face harshly like that.

woot! I'd like to see an entire network follow suit... say SciFi or Commedy Central or you pick... but one whole network that just says fuck it, lets let them download the stuff...

Re:Illegally?

[eln]

He's not just sure, He's HIV positive.

Re:Illegally?

[trolltalk.com]

Yeah, but making it legal to download will take all the fun out of it ...

Re:Illegally?

[Artuir]

I hate to burst your bubble but south park's creators have had this stuff up on their site for weeks. The summary makes it seem like it will happen soon but in reality all of the episodes have been viewable before now.

Re:Illegally?

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

If it's the same orange pen I got, it summed up vista and office 2k7 nicely:
it looked like a fairly standard retractable ballpoint. It had features that were pretty but pointless (led lights) that were activated using the interface (clicker at the end) that is normally reserved for the pen tip Hide/Unhide function. To Unhide the pen tooltip, you had to turn the barrel (requiring both hands). Making it twice as difficult to use as opposed to it's implied functionality.

Furthermore, it crapped out on me halfway through the keynote.

Re:Illegally?

[deanlandolt]

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.

Re:Illegally?

[edwdig]

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.

It's the same exact thing. The author gives the publisher some or all rights to their work in exchange for money and/or royalties. If they have a problem with it, they should have negotiated for more rights.

More free, legal TV online

[DogDude]

Just discovered last week... NBC has the entire season 4 of The Office online, watchable in full screen, with traditional TV-like ads interrupting the shows. Of course, nobody likes ads, but it's worth it to me, at least, and I'm glad to see some of the old-school media companies like NBC FINALLY starting to "get it".

Re:More free, legal TV online

[garett_spencley]

"Just discovered last week... NBC has the entire season 4 of The Office online"

OMG ... that's almost as good as if Paramount were to offer Star Trek V for free download.

*crosses fingers*

Re:More free, legal TV online

[an.echte.trilingue]

Yeah, but having seen Comedy Central's other offerings (Colbert Report and the Daily Show), I am skeptical. Take two sites:

• The Official Colbert Report site is slow, experiences frequent outages, has mediocre quality video, crashes several major browsers after 10-20 minutes of viewing, and shows you the same add every two and a half minutes. On the plus side, it looks pretty.
• The pirate south park site is slow, experiences frequent outages and has mediocre quality video. However, the shows are easy to browse and the adds are limited to things outside of the viewer window (and are blockable).

From my perspective, the choice is clear here. I am sure that Comedy Central will do a worse job than the pirates did. It will be just like when they got Colbert off of YouTube and replaced it with something worse.

The media companies are really slow to learn: the Internet gives them a potential gold mine, they just have to come up with a way to deliver their wares that sucks less than what Joe up the street can do. So far, they fail, Comedy Central and Viacom included.

Re:More free, legal TV online

[Mex]

" I am sure that Comedy Central will do a worse job than the pirates did. It will be just like when they got Colbert off of YouTube and replaced it with something worse."

Did you even bother to check the South Park site? It's really good, actually.

Full episodes, 3 segments per episode and usually one ad per segment. You can fast forward or back if you want and you don't get another advert.

All seasons from the beginning at pretty good quality (not DVD but very good for online), except for the most recent season which apparently needs 1 month to be shown.

Obligatory

[OverlordQ]

First (Cat) Piss.

Now we'll see which mods have seen s12e03 yet.

Re:Obligatory

[spun]

I worked with Matt & Trey's web production team on an online video game store back in 2000. I met them and hung out a few times. They were dosed to the gills that year at the Oscars.

You bastards!

[Rob T Firefly]

really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. They just admitted to piracy! Don't these two guys know that such a thoughtless criminal act takes the very food out of the mouths of.. um.. these two guys?

Re:You bastards!

[Rob T Firefly]

If they have any respect for America at all, they'll do the right thing and take themselves to court.

"Oh my God...

[LM741N]

they killed DRM! You bastards!"

Wrong tense.

[The-Bus]

The episodes are already online. Not "coming soon", not "to be"... you can see them right now.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Chris Burke]

The episodes are already online. Not "coming soon", not "to be"... you can see them right now.

Not "to be", eh? Well I guess that finally answer that question.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Creepy Crawler]

Whether or not you should commit suicide.

That's the soliloquy of "kill myself or not".

Re:Wrong tense.

[Azarael]

They aren't available in Canada (and elsewhere?) yet.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Pazy]

Even worse when I tried to watch it said 'sorry england' now im pissed cause im Scottish and in Scotland :( lol

Re:Wrong tense.

[Suddenly_Dead]

Alas, non-Americans get this screen, or a variation thereof.

Re:Wrong tense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean "pissed" in the American-English sense or in the British-English sense? Because both seem entirely plausible for a Scot.

Censored Mohammad episode

[crow]

Remember after the Mohammad cartoon panic, the episode where they were making a big deal that they were going to show Mohammad? The end where they were going to show him was apparently censored by Comedy Central. Is it cut in the online version?

no drm

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a flash based web player. there's no drm. same deal with all the new video from mtv networks. flash players, no windows stuff, etc.

* i work for mtv networks doing video syndication, so i'm posting anonymously.

Informative? Huh?

[NotQuiteReal]

I know many of you don't rtfa, but sheesh, you had to have at least seen the summary, you know, the first story thingy at the top of this page...

The very first thing after "garnetlion writes" is that very same "informative" link.

They don't mind

[Apoorv Khatreja]

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.