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Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

For those looking for a legal way to view episodes of the original series, they are currently on Paramount+ (as well as being available for purchase in the usual ways).

Paramount+ contains every episode except season 5, episode 22 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bri...

> An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (French: La Rivière du hibou, lit. 'The Owl River') is a 1961 French short film, almost without dialogue. It was based on the 1891 American short story of the same name by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce. It was directed by Robert Enrico and produced by Marcel Ichac and Paul de Roubaix with music by Henri Lanoë. It won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards. The film was later screened on American television as episode 22 of the fifth season of The Twilight Zone on 28 February 1964.

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Legal? For an over sixty-year-old show, where all the participants are long dead? Plainly an area where the law is in the wrong, and public domain stolen from.

> These exclusive rights are subject to a time limit, and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1927, are in the public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

It's a bit more complicated for pre-1978 works, but that's the gist. It's been this way for a long time; if you want to shorten the copyright period, you must change the law.

If the time period keeps getting extended, then it's just a more complicated way of saying "indefinitely."

It stopped getting extended a few years ago, and old works have once again started entering the public domain.

As far as I can tell, the last extension (sometimes called the Mickey Mouse protection act) was in 1998[1]. Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse film) will enter public domain in 2024 if nothing changes before then.[2] I guess we still have to wait 2 more years to see if Disney is able to extend copyright again, or if they plan to take a softer approach to protect the Empire this time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_sta...

bonus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Bell%27s_graph_showin...

Disney has at least claimed that they are not pursuing a further extension. The official stance is that its because trademarks and such give them sufficient protection, but it seems likely that the negative publicity around the Sunny Bono act is also related.

Apparently the GOP is explicitly targeting Disney-influenced copyright extensions in retaliation for its CEO's milquetoast criticism of the Flrodia anti-LGBT legislation:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-disney-ceo-oppo...

(not that I am endorsing Faux News, but you can rely on them to transcribe the party's agenda faithfully).

Between the bad publicity WDC has been getting for supporting trans rights, not supporting trans rights enough, and funding a self-described cabal in the city of Anaheim, they should definitely be keeping a low profile in politics right now.

They've been losing support of Republicans due to their increasingly lefty posture, so their power over congress may be waning. Guess we'll see.

Who downvoted this factual statement?

https://news.yahoo.com/disney-stock-drops-florida-republican...

It (the film, not the Twilight Zone episode) appears to be available on Vimeo. It was uploaded 12 years ago, so I'm assuming it's OK to share here.

https://vimeo.com/15147706

The segment with Vic Morrow is a perfect illustration of the article: it would never have been allowed in 1959, and with the rise of Southern Revisionism ("the ~~Civil War~~ War between the States was fought over abstract constitutional issues of States' Rights, not the defense of chattel slavery, not that there is anything wrong with enslaving non-humans"), may not be again soon.

Those looking for the BEST way should get the Blu-Rays, which were scanned from film.

So many shows were shot on film; I wish they'd scan and re-release more of them.

The Paramount+ episodes are the same film scan masters as the Blu-Ray, so they generally look good.

Of course streaming is always worse than a BR because when you don't have a copy of the data, the content masters will always prefer to send you the cheapest and lowest-rate encoding that they can get away with... "How should we meet our 10% cost reduction KPI this quarter? I know, let's dump streaming quality again."

Indeed. Next up: "4K" at sub-30-Mbps rates. What a pathetic joke.

Any idea why it's not included?

Possibly they just got the rights to air the film, but didn't actually get ownership. I'd imagine when the language was written up, the assumption was made that Twilight Zone would only take the form of over-the-air TV broadcast.

This is incredibly common with TV shows produced before the rise of DVD box-sets (early/mid-00s). Shows had a defined lifecycle: they'd premiere (and make back most of the production cost), re-run the following summer (assuming the show was popular enough to not get cancelled), and then if the show reached ~100 episodes, it would be picked up for syndication. All but the most popular shows would essentially cease to exist 10-15 years after their initial run ended, so it was cheaper to license third-party elements (music, this French film) on a time-limited basis to keep costs down.

I had forgotten about summer reruns. That's a blast from the past.

I daresay a good part of the readership here would have trouble imaging that to watch non-live TV shows you had to be sitting in front of a TV at a particular time and if you missed it, that might be it.

Just one reason you mostly couldn't do heavily serialized TV. You could pull it off for a heavily promoted miniseries or limited run series. But, by and large, shows where missing an episode meant you were lost, just wouldn't fly in general.

I feel like TiVo actually opened up a lot of this and the nascent streaming available at the time (hulu/youtube?) is what kicked off the rise of actually serialized and episodic TV.

It is very funny having to explain to people why shows like "star trek: the next generation" basically had to reset everything by the end of the episode back into it's original state in order for syndication to work (episodes are basically played in any order aside from the few 2-parter episodes).

Yes, I assume that Lost--for whatever its problems--was essentially a child of Internet discussions plus TiVo/DVRs. Babylon 5 was even earlier but it was pretty niche and many fans (like myself) were content to timeshift on VCRs by then.

And, yes, syndication was a significant revenue stream that basically didn't work unless you could randomly drop into a Law and Order episode or pretty much any sitcom.

Not just TV shows, but movies too. I saw Star Wars in the theater. I didn’t see it again (there was no way to see it again) until years later when it was shown on TV.

Or second-run/revival theaters. I used to be very involved with a film group undergrad. We could get weekend audiences for a thousand people or more for relatively recent (but no longer still in theaters) movies and hundreds for older films.

These days, whatever preferences some people may have for seeing films in a theater with an audience, attendance has dwindled to very few.

With the rise of home video and better home-viewing experiences, second-run showings aren't really worth it. Most movies are available on home video by the time their theatrical run ends (and if they're really popular, they may still be in their theatrical run). A digital rental will typically be about the same price ($4USD) as my local second-run theater, only it's far more convenient.

Movie buffs, especially in big cities, will still have repertory/revival showings of old films. But that's a different market -- they're not looking to see an old movie, they're looking to see that movie in a communal environment, and sometimes with additional features like a discussion panel afterwards.

> Just one reason you mostly couldn't do heavily serialized TV. You could pull it off for a heavily promoted miniseries or limited run series. But, by and large, shows where missing an episode meant you were lost, just wouldn't fly in general.

Soap Operas had been managing to do this for decades before B5 showed up (although yeah, B5 did it a lot better)

Well, soap operas mostly had a very specific audience who could be counted on to watch most days and didn’t have a lot of intricate plotting.

Soap Opera plots are crazy complicated! They just advance very, very slowly.

And to a related point, there are TV series like Northern Exposure where the music was pretty integral to the show but don't have the rights to, so apparently the DVD releases are pretty compromised.

That's a good example. Another is Beavis and Butthead. My understanding is that when the shows originally aired they were relying on MTV's rights to air the videos featured in the episodes. So now any episodes (streaming or disc) only show the fully animated segments, and not the interludes where the two are sitting on the couch. Sadly, those are some of the best moments of the show...

wkrp in cincinnati suffers from the same issue. Too many great songs as part of dialogue or plot.

Pretty much. And, in fact, most of the value presumably came from (as far as they knew at the time) the initial airing of the episode. So why pay more for all the rights?

Per Wikipedia:

Three years after its production, the film was screened on American TV as part of the fantasy/science fiction show The Twilight Zone. Producer William Froug had seen the film and decided to buy the rights to broadcast it on American television. The transaction cost The Twilight Zone $25,000, significantly less than the average of $65,000 they expended on producing their own episodes; however, Froug's purchase allowed for the film to be aired only twice (the first airing was on February 28, 1964). Consequently, it is not included on The Twilight Zone's syndication package, though it is included with the series on home video releases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bri...

IANAL but from the brief info you shared it sounds like the show had rights to include the film on broadcast x times but not the rights for later distribution.

It is out of copyright where I live.

For now

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