Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.
Every Daily Show episode since Jon Stewart took over as host in 1999? Disappeared. The historic remains of The Colbert Report? Disappeared. Presumably, one hopes, those materials remain archived internally somewhere, but for the general masses, they’re kaput. Instead, the links redirect visitors to Paramount+, a streaming service whose offerings pale in comparison. (The service offers recent seasons of the Daily Show to paying subscribers, but only a fraction of the prior archive.)
Such digital demolitions are becoming routine. For fans and scholars of pop culture, 2024 may go down as the year the internet shrank. Despite the immense archiving capabilities of the internet, we’re living through an age of mass deletion, a moment when entertainment and media corporations see themselves not as custodians of valuable cultural history, once freely available, but as ruthless maximisers of profit. Those of us who believe in the historical value of accessing media from the past are paying the price.
I’m starting to get the data hoarding crowd more and more. We have been taught this dream of “the internet never forgets” but people missed to mention that it’s on the average Janes and Joes to make sure that is the case. Corporations want the internet to forget because it’s better for business.
I’ve become the same. I’m now that person seeking out more obscure and underrated gems from anywhere in the 30s through the 90s. I hate the thought of all this cultural collateral damage disappearing forever.
The internet certainly forgets…but a Usenet service with good retention will remember for about a decade
Never heard it put better
The internet never forgets… your private information.
I don’t buy anything less than a 3 year warranty. 0 issues so far.
I typically buy hgst drives.
I remember being laughed at when I admitted I still buy CDs, DVDs, or BluRays a few years ago.
Yep.
I rip them, then store the discs in a cool, dark, dry place.
Everything I rip is backed up. It’s pretty clear what’s happening.
And in 20 years they’ll start “selling” everything by the episode online.
They’re super cheap at thrift and consignment type stores right now. DVDs are like $1-3 if you know where to look. Libraries still have a lot of that stuff too if you just want to borrow it.
In the modern age, we all need to be our own archivists, saving whatever we can from a perpetually burning Library of Alexandria. This is why pirates are a community, each one saves a little bit of history that matters to them, and then we share.
Public domain and abandonware and forgotten media are regarded by the media companies as a threat to their business model, since it is possible you can be entertained by them rather than their own for-cost offerings. It is no longer enough for them to control what you consume media, but insist on controlling whether you consume.
And the courts regard them as persons and members of the public as not. We don’t count as invested parties.
According to the US and the EU we common folk don’t figure.
It is now more ethical to pirate (or simply not consume it at all) than it is to obtain legitimate licenses.
GenX tv addict here. I grew up in a time when, if you wanted to watch a show, you need to make an effort to be in front of the tv when it aired. If you missed seeing it, you had to hope that if was repeated over the summer (only about 2/3’s the episodes of a continuing series would be repeated, and if a show was cancelled, that was it). If you missed it on summer repeats, you’d have to hold the show went into syndication, was carried locally at a time you were able to watch it, and then stalk the series because syndication packages were notoriously shown out of order (which is why almost all the episodes ended up with the characters being in the same base situation as they started out in).
It was the same thing if there was an episode or series you loved and wanted to watch again.
VCRs were an absolute game changer. You didn’t have to revolve your life around a tv schedule- you could go out, to go events, go shopping, have a late dinner. You could pause tv to go to the bathroom, you could watch and re-watch episodes that you enjoyed, or verify something you thought had happened earlier instead of relying on collective memory. If you missed taping something, you might still have to wait for re-runs - but there was also the chance that someone else had taped it and could loan you the tape.
Having learned the lessons of broadcast tv, I taped everything I watched, and I kept the tapes of the stuff I liked, or that had actors I liked. I could sit down today and watch all the episodes of David Soul in Casablanca or Billy Campbell in Moon Over Miami, or short-lived shows like Space Rangers or South of Sunset.
I still record and save things locally. The myth of having immediate access to everything ever produced was always just a myth.
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“TV Guide” is still a phrase in our household. Mostly because I used to have a cat with… personality - he loved to push the limits of what was acceptable kitty behaviour. So my go to became ‘threatening’ to throw the TV Guide in his direction (not actually at him!) and saying firmly, “TV GUIDE!” He would always immediately stop what he was doing when he heard “TV GUIDE!” LOL. Fun times and fond memories!
Where you rocking the vcr+ codes or manually recording?
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Oh, access to everything will happen.
The owners will just charge us for every viewing of every episode.
access to everything that isn’t bogged down by stupid licensing deals, too. so many things just disappear because someone wants someone else to keep paying for that one song they added in a single episode 15 years ago.
One: thirty-year copyright, no exceptions. Culture belongs to its audience.
Two: noncommercial use is not copyright infringement. Copyright is only a monetary incentive for new works. There is no “unpublish.” Once it’s ours, you are entitled to any money involved, for a time. Take it or fuck off.
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A copyrighted work going into public domain means anyone can make copies and derivative stuff from that work, it does not mean that the public in general owns the “Star Wars” trademark. Disney would still be the only one able to make abysmally souless Star Wars sequels and flood the market with low quality Star Wars “content”.
And?
The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn’t live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century’s licenses! The horror! The tragedy!
That can’t be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I’ve been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.
The silliest part is, they could absolutely keep milking nonsense forever. All they’d lose is exclusivity. Star Wars would be a genre, the way zombies are, thanks to George Romero’s incompetent producers. And every new detail would still be in that vice-grip for another thirty years! Winnie The Pooh is public-domain and Disney’s still gonna slit throats if anyone depicts him wearing red.
I think everyone should do what I did and stop enjoying such things. Kill the media by not watching ads, not buying movie tickets, not paying subscriptions. Cut them out of society entirely.
At least they still exist somewhere, albeit hidden. In the early days of television, the BBC routinely taped over episodes, even of really popular shows, because the tapes were expensive.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Every now and then a box of old VHS recordings turns up in someone’s shed or attic, and can be added back in to the archive. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-67218634
So I was going to say thanks for the reminder to go check if more episodes of the Drew Carey Show had been uploaded to archive.org since the last time I checked, only to find that those that were already on there (first 2 or 3 seasons I think?) are now all gone (apart from the Improv-A-Ganza episodes, which I will be downloading before they disappear too). Nowhere is safe.
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If you’re looking for a quick fix to watch the Drew Carey show, the whole series is free to watch on Plex right now. But who knows how long that will last
I’ll give it a look, thanks! Though I was really looking forward to having the entire collection safe on my own machine. :/
Yeah I feel that. There’s also ads in it and they don’t even follow some of the traditional ad breaks through the episodes
I’ve never used Plex before, that’s a huge turn off. Though tbf I’ve still not watched the episodes I already have, so I’m in no rush to put myself through that annoyance lol
It’s good to know they’re there though, for now anyway, and that at least someone has them and is making them available.
Don’t blame Plex for that, they’re just aggregating streams from other sources.
Not blaming anyone, just don’t want to watch content with ads, so I won’t…
Is there a data hoarding community on Lemmy or is this basically it?
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Not sure we can rely on internet archive for long.
Based on what is being shared on Facebook? No. No they are not
Those of us who believe in the historical value of accessing media from the past are paying the price.
Who said I paid for anything?
The price this is referring to is not monetary. It’s the loss of access and goods.
