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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children's show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI's five-year strategy for 2017-2022. "Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk," said Heather Stewart, the BFI's creative director. "It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don't do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. "Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years' time." The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK's entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100,000 of the "most at-risk" British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes "early children's programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television." The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. "We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe," she said.
Episodes of Dr Who and The Goodies are gone because they were not on that sort of list. Significant or not a non-trivial number of people would have wanted to see them and even shell out cash to do so. As an example, a restored version with animation of Dr Who "Power of the Daleks" was recently in cinemas.
Choosing a narrow list has already lost us some interesting material so it's probably a good idea not to tightly restrict this time either. There will be gems among all the muck.
Such a process resulted in the losses I gave as examples above. An afternoon drama for children didn't seem all that important culturally so Dr Who episodes that could be making money for the BBC were thrown away.
The easy way to preserve old content is to restore the public domain, and limit the current infinitely extended copyright.
Currently, most every audio and video recording ever made is copyrighted and extended every few decades to protect the interests of a few large companies.
As a side effect, preserving old media is often illegal without permission/licensing (which may be impossible), even if the media is abandoned.
If there was a reasonable limit on copyright duration, then preservation occurs naturally by the public.
In the current model, public preservation is strictly prohibited and prevented with DMCA and similar, and old media may just disappear.
Shockingly, people can find old things funny. And they can find it funny today for different reasons than those for which audiences found it funny originally. Hell -- sometimes, comedy is funny today for the same reasons it was funny when it was new.
Jeffrey Fucking Crust Almighty, just let people enjoy shit.