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CBS Refuses To Preserve Jack Benny Footage
goosman writes "The president of the International Jack Benny Fan Club had the opportunity to review some holdings of the CBS vaults while assisting them with some transfers. In the vaults she found 25 shows on film that were unreleased, but in the public domain. The IJBFC offered to pay for the digitization and preservation of these shows; they got a letter of enthusiastic support from the Benny estate. CBS has so far refused to allow this preservation to happen." BoingBoing and TechDirt have both covered this act of cultural destruction.
As a big fan of Jack Benny's work I have to say CBS aren't a bunch of mother fuckers. They're a bunch of horse fuckers.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
A lot of the stuff in Looney Tunes / Merry Melodies comes from Benny. And he's the master of timing. It's brilliant.
Seriously, refusing to allow this public domain work to be restored at no cost to them means they are not holding up their end of the copyright bargain and so they should now lose their rights and protection under said laws. There's a social contract at work and it's stupid acts like this and the Sonny Bono perpetual protection of Mickey Mouse Act that make me have no qualms about "pirating" material when I feel like it. If they don't want to play nice then I see no reason to play their game at all.
Perhaps the federal government could appropriate the masters via eminent domain and make them available through the Library of Congress.
...by copyright, as long as CBS owns the only copies they control it and it is, therefor, not in the public domain. The copies are their property to do with as they see fit.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
CBS claims that there could be music clearance problems--which is an entirely legitimate possibility. The episodes are probably public domain because when they were made copyrights had to be renewed and there's little chance they were renewed. But if the music came from any outside source, it's quite possible that they *did* renew it, leaving the music in copyright today--and leaving CBS liable for serious damages in court if they just give the episodes to some fans to copy. Blame the copyright system, but do not blame CBS.
So kdawson posted a bunch of ill-informed sensationalism and invective on the Slashdot front page? I'm shocked.
This is a problem with the current copyright system as well. There is no mandate that a copy be put on file with the Library of Congress so that when the copyright does expire, someone might have access to it.
By my calculations, the copyright on Windows 1.0 expires in 2080. Do you think anyone will have a binary sitting around, much less the source to that program at that date? Highly doubtful.
Grow up, this has nothing to do with copyright law.
TFA even says that they're in the public domain. The only thing stopping anyone from preserving this stuff is the fact that the only copies in existence are owned by CBS. CBS owns the medium on which these things are stored and they are perfectly within their rights, even if the constitution prohibited any sort of copyright whatsoever, to refuse to give them to anyone for any reason they damned well feel like.
They're not refusing the right to copy the work(they can't) they're refusing to hand over tape reels which they own to someone else. It's not the right thing for them to do, but it is within their rights, and would be within their rights even if intellectual property were outlawed.
TFA even says that they're in the public domain.
Possibly true, although TFA does not provide much to justify this assertion. The shows were not broadcast (i.e. unpublished), so it is not at all certain that they will enter the public domain. The copyright status was not stated in TFA, which quoted a CBS exec as saying the rights situation was muddled.
If a work is kept private, it need not ever enter the public domain. Its owner may choose to release it, but there is no obligation to do so. If a work is published under copyright, it will eventually enter the public domain (although the wait is appallingly long). If it is published without copyright, it is immediately in the public domain.
From the third-hand information in TFS & TFA, it seems that these shows were not broadcast or released in other form. Unpublished works are private property, so CBS' stance is legally correct, whatever the wishes of others.
Grow up, this has nothing to do with copyright law.
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...they're refusing to hand over tape reels which they own to someone else. It's not the right thing for them to do, but it is within their rights, and would be within their rights even if intellectual property were outlawed.
And this is what makes the copyright vs public domain issue moot. Even if everyone has the right to copy them, CBS is not a public library and is under no obligation to hand over their tapes. But if they were registered for copyright, should not a copy have been submitted to a library of record (e.g. LOC)?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
No. It's the supreme court's fault that they misuse article III as if it were article V, which it in no way resembles or implies; it's the supreme court's fault that they disobey the constitution on behalf of the entire government; it's the supreme court's fault that the government is operating far outside its constitutionally authorized bounds.
The supreme court set themselves up -- unauthorized by the people -- as those who could re-define the constitution. Then, on top of that, they worked, and are working, to destroy everything it stands for. That's why they're at the top of that list. They enable the congress to make, and keep in force, laws that are explicitly forbidden, or not authorized, by the constitution.
The constitution has one critical flaw: It has no teeth. Violating it, on the part of judges, legislators... there is no penalty. Because of this, they can do whatever they want. And they do. This is why we are suffering under the inversion of the commerce clause. This is why we have ex post facto laws. This is why eight of the ten amendments of the bill of rights have been turned into caricatures of themselves in currently extant law. And this is why copyright law no longer resembles anything even vaguely implied in Article I, section 8, paragraph 8.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you have a book, you can copy and modify the book, building on it and creating derivative works. If you have a program, you cannot do that without source code. The whole point of copyright is to encourage people to create works which can eventually be built upon. If that is impossible then copyright has no purpose.
Actually there is another possiblity.
TV (and movie executives) have seroius ramifications if they suffer the 'embarrassment' of releasing something and then someone else making money off of it.
This is a big reason why many execs refuse to even license out a show (which brings in some profit) because no one wants to be branded as an exec that let something 'get away'.
In this case, the VP is probably worried that the preservation might be popular. The probabily of profit is too low for them to do it themselves, but the risk of someone else doing it is too high (with no reward), so the safest option is to let it die.
This is what happened with Invader Zim for instance. Nick did not think it was profitable for them and did not want to produce it, but it wold be career suicide to sell it to another network if it became profitable there.