Slashdot Mirror
Bing Crosby, Television Sports Preservationist
Hugh Pickens submits news first gleaned from a now-paywalled article at the New York Times (and, happily, widely reported) that "The hunt for a copy of the seventh and deciding game of the 1960 World Series, considered one of the greatest games ever played and long believed to be lost forever, has come to an end in the home of Bing Crosby, a canny preservationist of his own legacy, who kept a half-century's worth of records, tapes and films in the wine cellar turned vault in his Hillsborough, California home. Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio. Crosby knew he would want to watch the game later — if his Pirates won — so he hired a company to record Game 7 by kinescope, an early relative of the DVR, filming off a television monitor. The five-reel set, found in December in Crosby's home, is the only known complete copy of the game, in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a game-ending home run to beat the Yankees, 10-9."
is one of the all time great World Series.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That's certainly a sad state of affairs when kids thing of Bing and they think of a search engine. Bing Crosby one of the greatest singers of all time playing second to a search engine. A nice Bing Crosby story out of the blue and a bit of sports history recovered. Reminds me of the recent discovery of the lost footage of Metropolis. Treasures are still out there it's nice to know.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
It doesn't really matter what a dick like you might think about it, it's something worth preserving because a lot of people at the time cared about it.
And it's news for nerds because it's amazing that a copy exists at all.
It's amazing?
So if long-lost footage of Mike Smith of Omaha, Nebraska jerking off and drinking Schlitz in his basement suddenly resurfaces, by your logic, that would also be slashdot worthy?
Your interest in such an event doesn't constitute a lot of people caring about it, so no.
Slashdot is the proper forum for random people finding shit they thought was lost?
Really?
Bing Crosby is hardly a random person. And a sports event that a lot of people cared about is hardly 'shit'. They way he recorded it is also rather novel.
He was too nervous to watch the game - so he took a trip to Paris? Must be nice to have that kind of disposable income...
As a side note - although Fitzgerald originally wrote the line I used as the subject of this post, I always remember Hemingway's adaptation instead: "The rich are very different from you and I." "Yes - they have more money."
#DeleteChrome
I think it is relevant because it is an example of the usefulness of recording by the public as part of the deal between a creator and society. A copyright holder has the right to stop anyone from using the material for a (ridiculous long) period of time. The reward for society of giving a copyright holder this power, is that in the end the work enters the public domain. What you see here, is that the copyright holder got his end of the bargain from society (it is not relevant whether he actually ever sued over it; he had the right to), society doesn't get anything once the copyright holder loses interest (or trashes the recording).
People should make a mental note of this when it comes to arguing the duration of copyright, and also when it comes to DRM. I don't think that copyright should apply to DRM material because there obviously is no guarantee that the work could end up in the public domain. More likely the DRM technique used is likely to be abandoned before the copyright expires.
Bert
Who refuses to buy anything Blue-ray because of this.