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First Few Doctor Who Episodes May Fall To Public Domain Next Year
First time accepted submitter wmr89502270 writes "Doctor Who is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The special The Day of The Doctor will be broadcast simultaneously in over 75 countries and hundreds of cinemas in the UK. Across the world the hotly anticipated special episode will be screened simultaneously in full 3D. According to Copyright law of the United Kingdom, the copyright in a broadcast program expires 50 years from the end of the year in which it is broadcast, which means the first episodes will fall to public domain next year."
It probably won't hit PD in America until 3025. Like any other cultural work.
Thank you BBC beancounters. Thrifty today is costly tomorrow.
The MPAA and the RIAA must be absolutely scared shitless about the logistics of having to police the galaxy up to 55 light years to make certain that "I love Lucy" is not being pirated. At least the Brits only have to police less than 1875 star systems for pirates. Man those aliens must be really happy out past 50 years that they are finally going to be able to record DR WHO! They must be wonder when they will be able to digitize Gun Smoke and Bonanza but that might not happen in their life times.
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Namely, destruction of all extant copies.
BBC destroyed the only copies of most of those episodes decades ago. The only existing copies are some that were sent overseas and temporarily lost, so they were not recovered and destroyed. Others only exist in the form of home-made speaker-to-microphone reel-to-reel audio tapes.
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The music, script and everything else will still be under copyright, and those rights are required to make a copy of the show.
What you _might_ be able to do is make a derivative work of the audio+video in the episode.
Namely, destruction of all extant copies.
BBC destroyed the only copies of most of those episodes decades ago. The only existing copies are some that were sent overseas and temporarily lost, so they were not recovered and destroyed. Others only exist in the form of home-made speaker-to-microphone reel-to-reel audio tapes.
Actually, "wiping" was a rather common practice for every broadcaster back then. Tape was expensive, etc.
You said it, Time Cube Guy.
The missing episodes don't start until a few serials in. There are decent quality copies of all of the first three serials floating around. Almost all of the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton episodes are missing though. A few of the key ones are intact--"The Tomb of the Cybermen" and "The War Games" for example--but for the most part his entire run is gone.
If only we had a way to go back and keep this happening, by using some sort of "time machine"...
Interestingly, when the "junking" of old Dr.Who episodes stopped in 1978, both the stories you cite ("Tomb" and "War Games") were either missing completely or the majority of episodes had gone; obviously they have since been recovered (the missing "War Games" episodes from the British Film Institute in 1979 and "Tomb of the Cybermen" from Hong Kong in 1991.)
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You can pay real money to get The War Machines on DVD.
Not only that but that old tape was VERY temperamental about how much climate and humidity it would tolerate so had to be kept in...well practically a vault with strict climate control which is why so many shows from the 40s-60s were lost both in the USA and the UK, the cost to keep early tape in playable condition was just insane.
Also you have the fact that as TVs switched to color most folks really didn't seem interested in watching some old B&W show, they all wanted color to enjoy on their new sets which made corps like the BBC figure that B&W shows would never be worth a nickel and when you figure in the insane costs of storing the film and the cost of the films themselves? not really surprising that they didn't keep them.
Finally as for copyrights? I believe until We,The People have a seat at the table they should be looked at as what they are, unjust laws bought by bribes and like all unjust laws should be ignored as much as possible. What we have in america does NOT fit either into the framework the founders wrote nor any idea of a "reasonable time", no what we have is Valenti's "forever minus a single day" because every time it looks like that fucking mouse will end up in PD Disney will bribe the politicians for another stay. this is why if you want to pirate something? Please by all means pirate Disney, don't give those bribing bastards a single cent of your money. I mean how fucked up is it that Walt has been dead longer than many here have been alive and many of his first works, made when planes were made of cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, is STILL under copyright?
Until copyrights actually have limits again we,the People should simply ignore them, they no longer serve their intended purpose and now merely enrich a few old white guys that lock more and more of a culture behind a paywall.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Also, don't forget that the Actors and Musicians union limited the number of repeats that could be shown in any given year; nowadays it seems to be mostly repeats with a few new programmes thrown in to the schedules occasionally.
The Union members hated repeats as their members didn't get paid as much compared to first-run broadcasts. So effectively, the TV broadcasters were accumulating large amounts of material that they couldn't reshow.
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You don't see any solution? How about shorter copyright terms so people can redistribute the works instead of needing to privately hoard them for 95 years.
50 years... in which time frame?
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No, that's real real money. He was talking about hypothetical real money, i.e. he wouldn't actually pay anything, but he really wants to be able to download it for free.
AFAIK all the Jon Pertwee episodes exist, but not all of them exist in colour. In these cases, the Quad tapes were erased but the 16mm B/W copies for export survived. Some of them exist in colour but derived from low-quality copies (IIRC they managed to digitally marry the chroma signal from a Umatic copy of the NTSC conversion with the higher-res 16mm print to improve the quality).
A couple of years back someone devised a way of partially reconstructing the colour signal by digitally decoding the RGB triads on a high-res scan of the print, so the B/W-only episodes may yet be colourised.
The first serial (An Unearthly Child) survives and has been restored into pretty good condition. The second serial (The Daleks), also survives. The fourth serial (Marco Polo) is missing some episodes, and so are several of the later ones. Most of season 3 is lost (including all of four of the seven serials and most of several of them, such as The Daleks' Master Plan) and so are some important bits of Season 4 (including most of the last episode, when the first Doctor dies).
It's a very good argument for shorter copyright, as copyright holders apparently can't be trusted to ensure that our cultural legacy survives.
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Some of the older material for shows of this era is preserved on cellulose. Unfortunately, as it ages, it becomes a lot more reactive until it will spontaneously ignite on contact with air. I spoke to someone from the BBC archives a few years ago and they have some warehouses with rolls of cellulose in barrels of oil (so that they won't come into contact with any oxygen). Each of these barrels is under a hopper of sand so that, if it does ignite, it can be extinguished before it spreads (a warehouse full of oil is not exactly a safe environment for fires). They're waiting for restoration techniques to improve before they can extract much of it.
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When *anything* is broadcast, nobody can be sure whether one day it will be part of our cultural legacy. Even when there's a time machine in it.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Why not, actually?
I mean, it's an equilibrium between the rights of the work's creator and the rights of the people: the people must forego their right to what has been added to their culture for a limited time, during which time the creator's income from distributing copies of the work is protected by the government.
After this period of time, the deal is that the people can freely distribute copies of that work of art. It probably works differently for e.g. sculptures than songs, but what's wrong with the following idea:
(*) If the work's creator doesn't cough up the work after having bought one or two extensions, sue them for ..... TADAA...
THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
(I've been looking forward to using that expression in a context where it actually makes sense). For indeed, if you have a contract with your culture to enrich it with your work after profiting from it yourself for a time, and after that time you or your descendants don't live up to your end of the bargain, then you have indeed *stolen* intellectual property from its rightful owners, the society that nurtured your creativity.
I'd like to add that there should be no penalties if the creator didn't buy an extension and lost their source code in a harddisk crash; let that 14 year copyright extension be a signal that the work is of commercial value.
What do you think? (Especially if you're Rufus Pollock)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Yes the US archival situation is a lot better than the UK one. One reason is that multiple copies of TV shows were made so that they could be shown across the states in multiple time zones and with more copies, there's more chance of something having survived.
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From 1993 onwards there has been a British Film Institute Initiative to recover lost British TV. Its called "Missing Believed Wiped." I attended the first two of these and we were told that anything - brief clips, audio recordings, cine film taken from a TV set, domestic VCR/VTR material etc. was of interest. But I know of a few cases where audio material was offered up and there was no interest. One BBC Engineer was given a lost Harry Worth TV episode and he kept it in his locker for the better part of a year before giving it to the archives.
And then there is the matter of the wiped children's shows. You might think these don't count; only vid kid after all? But people have fond memories of some of those TV shows and were horrified to discover that the BBC Archivist had decided on his own back in 1993 to wipe many episodes so that the 2 inch tape could be sold to countries that used this obsolete format (Australia, being one I believe). Some of those shows only exist because commercial copies had been made for overseas sales, but the original tapes are now gone. When the BBC wanted to put together a tribute night to one of the people involved in one of those kids shows, they were horrified to find that a lot of stuff had been erased. And the BBC Archivist kept his job. At the same time as he was doing this, he was on the podium at "Missing Believed Wiped" telling the audience that the BBC were interested in lost material. Oh, the irony. Oh, the hypocrisy.
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WOW! I never would have believed the 1790s would ever ACTUALLY call.
Hey, while you're listening, could you make sure they fix the whole slavery thing? Trust me, it'll cause problems in another couple of decades. Also, clear up this shitty second-amendment misunderstanding, will you? Hurry.
Oh, and enjoy your 28-year copyright terms while they last. They'll be increasing them to 42 years within your life, and you've seen nothing yet - in our time it's up to 120 years!
Any form of entertainment that is enjoyed by a nontrivial proportion of the population is part of our cultural legacy. It's only later that you can tell how important a part it is.
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They made the right call at the time, given that the alternative to was to archive every tape and stack up a nontrivial fraction of the BBC's budget in a vault in preparation for applications that didn't exist.
Most media go through a period where the recording format is too valuable not to reuse (magnetic tape) or too fragile to store (nitrocellulose film, early print). Some day maybe we'll invent a way to record brain patterns, but I'm inclined to expect it'll be in a medium like defect-free carbon-hassium nanocrystals that cost $500,000 each. I don't doubt that some re-recording in whatever technology we come up with.
NASA recorded over the Moon Landing masters, at a time when they were better-funded than they have ever been. The BBC is in good company.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Broadcast material has no physical medium, so there was initially no way for the receiver to archive it. It wasn't a conspiracy, just no-one thought about the implications.
So George Lucas was hoping thousands didn't know how to program their fancy new VCRs when they aired the Star Wars Holiday Special? To think, if it aired just a few years earlier, it too might have been a "lost work".
I think it should be 'rise into the public domain'.
Just when I thought it was safe (at 65+) to come out from behind the sofa...
It's unfortunate that the BBC were so shortsighted and "recycled" the master tapes of so many great series. Of course, everyone knows the famous Monty Python story of how that series was almost lost too, but was saved by Terry Gilliam (who basically stole the tapes and put them in his attic). But very few series from that era were so lucky.
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It's unfortunate that the BBC were so shortsighted and "recycled" the master tapes of so many great series. Of course, everyone knows the famous Monty Python story of how that series was almost lost too, but was saved by Terry Gilliam (who basically stole the tapes and put them in his attic). But very few series from that era were so lucky.
I did not know that, though I've often wondered why they survived when so much else was lost. Also, "stealing the tapes" is not exactly a trivial exercise - the original Quad tapes were massive - 2" wide, 10.5" diameter and about 5KG each. If they had 2 episodes each, that's about 22 tapes he'd have had to sneak out of the archives. Not exactly something you can fit in your pocket...
Marco Polo is not missing "some episodes". All episodes of Marco Polo are missing. Judging from the quality of the script, the critical reviews, and the extant production stills, this is probably the greatest "missing" Doctor Who story. You whipper snappers, get your Doctor Who stuff right.
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