Image description: a screenshot from the Wikipedia page for the Doctor Who TV series, with a user-added caption that reads “Preserve the media you can before it’s gone forever.” The Wikipedia article reads, “No 1960s episodes exist on their original videotapes (all surviving prints being film transfers), though some were transferred to film for editing before transmission and exist in their broadcast form. [88] Some episodes have been returned to the BBC from the archives of other countries that bought prints for broadcast or by private individuals who acquired them by various means. Early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved, as well as excerpts filmed from the television screen onto 8 mm cine film and clips that were shown on other programmes. Audio versions of all lost episodes exist from home viewers who made tape recordings of the show. Short clips from every story with the exception of Marco Polo (1964), “Mission to the Unknown” (1965) and The Massacre (1966) also exist.”
There was documentary done a few years back on the comedian Bob Monkhouse and about his obsession archiving media, a lot of which were thought to be lost forever. He had multiple VHS players set up around his house to record things in an era where not many of the general public had one. He also kept tv guides and had written into the margins if there was a change in the schedule. He was actually taken to court in the 70’s for copyright infringement but the case was thrown out, though quite a few items from his archive were seized and never returned.
My grandfather got really into video archiving and from the early 80s through 2005 amassed about 14,000 video tapes, mostly of various aviation TV shows. He spent his entire life as an engineer for Lockheed. His entire 2-story condo in San Diego was a massive VHS library with shelving extending 8 ft high.
Anyways, my father and aunt threw it all in a dumpster because they didn’t know what to do with it. All they kept were his ashes… Which almost 20 years later are still sitting on a bookshelf somewhere
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It was called The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse. I think there might be a very poor quality version of it on YouTube.
Wow that’s dedication.
I knew what this was from without reading the description. Such a sad portion of a wikipedia article to read.
Tonee?
I’m the unknown fourth member of the group, Jeff
I wish there were something like bittorrent that worked better as an archival mechanism. The weakness of bittorrent is that material tends to disappear completely when there is no longer widespread popular interest in it.
Was just thinking about this. Usenet guarantees a certain amount of time ~10 years, and a torrent only lasts as long as people are willing to seed. The problem is, long term seeding takes up too much individual space, and I never know when it’s necessary. Obviously I’m not wasting 500GB of storage to seed something with 100+ seeders. More trackers should offer bonus points for things with less than 2-3 seeders to ensure long term survival of the media.
Usenet doesn’t guarantee any time at all. Content is purged regularly if it’s not being downloaded.
Don’t even have to go that far back. Look at Netflix removing the DnD Community episode because Chang dresses as a drow elf (black skin, white hair). He even says he’s a drow in the episode yet Netflix removed it from the series since it was “racist”. Without pirates that episode would quickly be forgotten.
Oh true, I didn’t even think about preservation of different versions of episodes
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Removing an episode for being racist (even though this one wasn’t racist) is not cultural genocide. Wearing blackface (I know, this wasn’t blackface) is not a culture that needs to be preserved.
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Our mistakes as a culture absolutely need to be preserved in order to prevent history from repeating itself long after the people making said mistakes have passed on.
Not every part of preservation should be a celebration of the past. It is as vitally important that we learn the things we did wrong as well as right.
Just do what WB did and add a slide saying that these were products of their time and that we know better today.
While I agree that piracy can be preservation of media, it’s most often not the case.
Streaming torrents directly or through real-debrid doesn’t help preserve media at all. Leeching only without keeping torrents alive also doesn’t keep media accessible.
Some people might store media for a few decades and then reupload, but most people never create new torrents.
I’d say the pirates who help preserve media are a small subset of pirates.
read OP’s post. if it not were for privacy in the first place and people ripping media, there wouldn’t be any copy left of those shows.
Of course not all pirates archive, but there’s an important percentage that do. Non-pirates are running out of options because each year less and less audiovisual productions release as physical media (old DVDs, more recently blue rays) and are only available through a subscription model where you do not own the actual content.
So piracy is pretty much the only route available to archive a lot of content.
You’re right, piracy is often the only way to archive media. Many releases aren’t available on BluRay in all regions. It’s thanks to those people who go through the trouble and rip media.
I meant to comment above on how not all piracy helps preserve media.
I can’t tell if you are saying only ripping content helps preserve it or that seeding does too. I download things but seed them as long as possible. (Technically until I run out of disk space, but that hasn’t happened yet and I think I will upgrade before it does.) Considering how many pirates download things and keep seeding, I think the pirates that don’t help preserve stuff could be the minority.
Seeding definitely helps preserve media. My comment meant to say that many people pirate media without seeding like ddl, usenet or leeching on public trackers. E.g. because they don’t have good upload or not enough storage.
The problem with BitTorrent is that seeding libraries usually don’t survive a change or upgrade of the client, you’d have to find all the original .torrents and point the client at the right folders, praying it doesn’t overwrite the with empty files for some reason.
That’s another good post, thanks for sharing
Basically all historical documents are copies of original. Including the Bible lmao.
There’s all the remasters and tweaks as well. Star Wars is the obvious example, but even things like Red Dwarf got messed with with awful looking CGI plastered in.
At least they realised Red Dwarf tinkering was a bad idea and the originals still safely exist. I think they said they used the original negatives for Star Wars which were spliced and used for the Special Editions. They kept telling the public the original negatives for untouched Star Wars no longer exist. I can’t believe that’s true though. George keeps a copy of everything. There even a cut of Star Wars that used rear screen protection instead of blue screen!
The 4k77 guys pretty much provided what fans have been asking for. Lucas had his chance and chose to charge the fans for something they didn’t ask for.
Odds are George personally owns the originals and was able to retain them as part of the terms of the sale to Disney.
He doesn’t want them to be released and this is how he prevents it
Reminds me of Fraggle Rock. Due to the television station that produced the show being taken over many times over the years, most of the original broadcast masters have been lost. I think all episodes have been found but they’re mostly at home VHS recordings.
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Oh wow. I’ve never even heard of that show. I chose Doctor Who for my post because of it’s cultural influence and because I love the show, but it’s just crazy to think how much more lesser known media gets lost the same way
I don’t see any evidence supporting this, but I also don’t recall ever seeing reruns in the US.
I forgot to mention, this was specifically relevant to the UK version of Fraggle Rock as each country has different wraparounds.
The British inserts were filmed first at the TVS Television Theatre in Gillingham, Kent, and later at their larger studio complex in Maidstone (the former since closed and demolished) and presents Fraggle Rock as a rock-filled sea island with a lighthouse. Exterior footage was that of St Anthony’s Lighthouse located near Falmouth in Cornwall. The lighthouse keeper is The Captain (played by Fulton Mackay), a retired sailor who lives with his faithful dog Sprocket. In the third season, as MacKay had died in 1987, the role was played by John Gordon Sinclair as P.K., (the Captain’s nephew) and in the fourth and final season by Simon O’Brien as B.J. (son of the lighthouse’s owner, Mr. Bertwhistle). In 2014, 35 of these British wraparounds were still missing, believed wiped, although subsequent recoveries have gradually reduced this number.[7] As of December 2020, all 96 wraparounds have been found and handed over to the BFI, confirming that the entire UK production still exists in some shape or form.[8] Nickelodeon repeated it in the UK from 1993, as did Boomerang and Cartoonito in 2007. The episodes shown were the original North American versions.
I had the brilliant idea the other day of passing an amendment to the copywrite laws to include “independent distributors” for media that is abandoned or removed from active sale/distribution by its copywrite holder. The stipulation is that “independent distributors” are not allowed to make money in any way from the provided service and if the holder wants to rerelease something or remake it, the ID has to pull that title until the holder pulls it from circulation again. I would also put the stipulation on holders that any release has to be materially similar and at a fair market price. They are not allowed to re-release a game from 30 years ago at full modern retail, remakes have to be the same game to count (FFVII:remake would not count, but the updated PC releases of FFVII would), and the sales must be readily available to all citizens in the country (so releasing something on your JP store exclusively does not preclude the independent distribution in the states).
The concept is exactly this. Legalize the preservation of media and art for future generations and allow free access to it, something akin to a digital online museum of games, movies, television shows, and commercials. If a content owner is not willing to make money from it, then there can be no damages.
My mans… you just described GOG.
I hadn’t ever checked out GOG. Cool stuff, but looking at their free stuff, I beg to differ on your interpretation. I am describing the legalization of the distribution of ROMs, movies/tv shows that are either unairing or undistributed in modern formats, or package software that is either abandoned or has had support dropped for it. Essentially, being able to get a copy of Windows 95 or an old version of Photoshop.
Also, GOG looks to primarily be a storefront for game sales, not a free-access repository. The major stipulation in my idea is that the “independent distributor” is not allowed to profit from the content. So no selling it. It has to be done entirely at their own expense.
I don’t have the originals, but I am happy to say I have all of the 1963 and 2005 Doctor Whos (with the exception of some new stuff… I should really get sonarr.) They are on i2p and I am still seeding if anyone wants them.
I’m still very new to torrenting, is i2p the name of a website or does it mean something like p2p?
I2P is similar to TOR in that it’s an alternative Internet with strong privacy protections, in many ways stronger than TOR, but nothing that still uses TCP over IP can be truly secure.
Huh interesting. I guess I’ll have to start looking into it more, thanks
https://geti2p.net/en/download for the java version, which comes with extra apps. Otherwise, you can go to https://i2pd.website/ for the C++ version which is much lighter and you can just point your browser/torrent clients at the i2p router and you are good to go.
Thank you for the links! I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend lol
I had them all, until the disk I had them on died… Will implement i2p tomorrow.
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Usenet is worth it. More selection, no hoping that someone is out there seeding, and the quality is almost always much better.
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The mule may be a ghost town, but Soulseek is still alive and well
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Thanks for the tip - I now have Nicotine+ running in docker on my NAS :)
Head to 4chan: /r/ Requests and /t/ Torrents. Good magnet link trade there.
I do hope that the new torrent protocol will help with that, especially for “compilations of stuff” (e.g series, episodes, starring XYZ, …): as I understand it, seeding will become a global file-level thing that can cross torrent boundaries. The new trend of seeding and referencing over I2P might help with keeping the old stuff afloat too.
This is extremely common with media that is seen as “artless” mass market as well. Dr. Who was pulp and not deemed worth preserving.
Another example is the show that made me get into model making: Art Attack. A disney show made in the UK that was never collected or released in the original version.
There are some torrents of the Hindi version apparently, but that’s all.
Oh true.
Art attack was also shown in Australia in the 90s. Surely there must be some copies somewhere. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking
Canadian here, we also had it. Hopefully someone has it recorded.
Reminds me of how something like 60% of video games only exist as emulators, because companies never bothered to preserve them in any form. There was even a remake of a game in the past few years that still had the Skidrow logo in it, because the devs had to go and torrent a pirated copy of the game since the original code was gone and they forgot to remove the cracker’s logo. There was also the infamous GTA remake that was made from the phone version of the game for the same reason.
Oh wow I didn’t know that. That’s both sad and hilarious that they used a pirated version
That is hilarious
Thanks for adding the link.
Sorry to be that guy but if the tapes were never preserved it’s probably because nobody cared…
The BBC stupidly recycled the tapes because they didn’t give much credence at the time to how important their archive would become.
This was a common practice, especially during a certain decade but I forget which. Old tapes were erased to be used again. No thought was given to preserving what was being wiped.
It was a cost-cutting measure to save money on tapes by reusing the old ones.
People absolutely do care. These lost media include the origins of shows that are still relevant today. But backups weren’t exactly treated with much care until relatively recently.
I highly doubt it would have cost much to preserve a few of the original tapes.
Yeah that’s kinda my point
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